For-sale public companies register a $700m cash cow

The federal government slugs users of the “public” companies register over 100 times operating costs.

The federal government slugs users of the “public” companies register more than 100 times what it actually costs to operate and is suppressing that secret cost structure ahead of is plans to sell the register — and associated vast tax streams — to a private company.

Those fees associated with the “public” register mean it is delivering a windfall to the government of more than 10,000 per cent annually.

Each year the government charges businesses — the vast majority small business owners — about $660 million to lodge material with the register, and then it charges those businesses and the public $60m to access that same information, or $720m a year in total.

But the register costs a tiny fraction of that, somewhere under $6m, to operate, The Australian can reveal.

Despite the register containing public information which the public is forced to overpay for, neither theAustralian Securities and Investments Commission, which operates the register, nor the government, which sets the fees, would say how much it actually costs to operate.

That cost is of such little significance to the bottom line of ASIC that it is not even broken down in its 194-page annual report.

The regulator’s 2015 annual report shows overall “supplier’s expense” to ASIC was $100.24m for the year.

That is further broken down in the notes to the accounts, where a line “information costs” appears, with a cost for the year of $6.047m.

The actual cost of operating the register is an unknown subset of this cost and despite repeated requests ASIC has refused to break it down.

ASIC chairman Greg Medcraft has declined to comment when asked by The Australian whether he considers the sale of the register and its hefty fees to be “honestly” in the public interest.

The $700m-plus windfall the government earns from the register is double ASIC’s entire annual budget of $311m.

The $60m the public is charged to access the public information alone — before even considering the $660m charged to business for providing the data — is more than 10 times the cost of operating the entire register.

In the US, Britain and New Zealand, for example, the fees are negligible or not existent.

Those exorbitant costs can make transparency in business dealings and the detection of corruption and malfeasance difficult. A simple search for a two-page document can cost up to $30, with relatively simple searches quickly reaching hundreds of dollars or more.

Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann, who is overseeing the sale, has attempted to justify it by stating 95 per cent of searches are free.

However this instead illustrates the extent of the deterrent caused by the enormous access costs, with the public able to only access bare-bones data, such as a company’s name and address.