Ken (sixth right) hands over the registration certificate to YSS president Francis James Noew.
KUCHING: The number of organisations registered with the Registrar of Societies’ (ROS) online system e-Roses is still far below target.
State director Ken Leben said out of the 3,229 bodies registered with the ROS, only slightly more than half have migrated to the new system.
“So far since the launching of the new system about two years ago until today only about 55 per cent of the total organisations registered with us have migrated to e-Roses, which is far below our initial target,” he told reporters after presenting a registration certificate to YATT (You Are Totally Trusted) Society Sarawak (YSS) — a newly-formed human rights society yesterday.
He pointed out that those yet to migrate to e-Roses will not be able to submit their annual returns, which eventually may cause some associations to be deregistered.
“Just for your information since last year until to date, 85 organisations have been deregistered where about 90 per cent were due to their failure in submitting their annual returns.
“In fact we are most reluctant to deregister any society but sometimes we just don’t have the choice if there was still no response from them to our reminders,” he said.
Ken explained that usually three reminders are sent, after which the association would be considered dormant or no longer in existence.
“Sometimes we give some flexibility if we know that the organisation still exists but if there is absolutely no news about them of course we have no choice but to strike out their names from our list,” he added.
In view of the slow response, he said ROS will continue to conduct outreach programmes statewide.
“This is going to be among our major activities for this year because we want all registered organisations to register themselves online so that they need not have to go to our office to file in their annual returns like before.
“Under the new system, everything can be done through online such as minutes of meetings, financial reports and so on as long as you have already migrated to the new system,” he said.