ASIC register plagued by capacity, migration issues

Businesses flock to consolidated database.

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission's converged business names register has struggled to cope with demand just a month into operation as organisations flood to register new names.

The commission reported "overwhelming demand" for the system and an unscheduled outage last week that saw many businesses fail the registration process during a five-hour period on Friday.

The national register launched this month to consolidate eight state and territory online systems and names databases, allowing businesses to register their name only once rather than in each state, saving the private sector an estimated $480 million over eight years.

The consolidated system migrated 84 million data records and 1.6 million existing business name registrations from state systems to ASIC's national register and, since launch on June 3, had received a total 22,000 registrations for businesses.

The system promised the ability to search a single, national database of business names "instead of trawling through several sites to check a business name, register and then maintain a registration".

But those attempting to use the system almost a month after launch have experienced difficulties conducting searches for business names and records on the new register.

Customers attempting to use the system told iTnews that attempts to search across all ASIC national and state registers was largely unreliable, while attempts to search across a single ASIC register was slow.

Support staff at ASIC acknowledged the issue with at least one customer, noting the database was experiencing difficulties "when there are too many people on at the same time".

One customer said support staff had acknowledged "a lot of problems" with the infrastructure side of the handover since launch.

A message on ASIC's support line has also told those attempting to use the search register that it was experiencing "overwhelming demand".

The commission acknowledged the problem for a "small group of customers" this week.

A spokesman for the commission said several fixes were planned for underlying infrastructure that would fix issues pertaining to payment, registration of Australian Business Numbers and user interface errors.

Errors were also found between new information input by businesses maintaining their records, and those migrated from state-based data repositories.

"We apologise for this inconvenience and we have made several fixes to the system to address this problem, including a further fix on Tuesday 19 June," the commission noted.