Lost in migration - dangerous defects in the Personal Property Securities (PPS) Register

Searching the PPS Register to discover charges that were previously registered at ASIC is a difficult, time-consuming and potentially risky business

The transfer of ASIC charges to the PPS Register has proven to be a seriously flawed process.  The problems include:

• Searchers seeking to find migrated charges must search companies by ABN and by ACN and by name. This is because a large number of migrated charges were incorrectly keyed to the ABNs of companies and not the ACNs which are the correct PPS identifier
   
• Thousands of ASIC charges simply failed to migrate at all and will not show up on any search of the PPS register. There is a list of these charges available and the authorities are trying to contact the chargees and lodging parties. Because these charges can't be migrated they have to be registered by the chargees or they will become unperfected
   
• Details of some chargees are missing in some cases where there is more than one chargee
   
• Large numbers of satisfied charges were migrated when they should not have been migrated at all

There are advisory notes posted on the PPS website listing the problems.

Author: Oliver Shtein