Central government, State governments, RBI, SEBI, and Ministry of corporate affairs (MCA), ICSI and ROC have provided various business support measures in response to Covid-19.
Due to Covid-19, there has been introduced some changes in the traditional way of carrying out compliances and conducting day to day activities among the businesses.
Due to this pandemic, it becomes more difficult to fulfil the compliances. To make it convenient government has considered the challenges in advance and provided the following relaxations from time to time:
- Removing the need of physical presence of Directors in at least one Board Meeting held during the year and authorizing to approve the prohibited matters through Video Conferencing.
- Promotion of Digital signing of documents
- Conducting AGM/EGM through Video Conferencing.
- Relaxations in date of filing various information with ROC/RD and SEBI (in routine)
- Extended date of conducting AGM as the auditors find it difficult to obtain sufficient audit information.
These relaxations made things convenient, easy and advanced at the same time and make the point that digitalization is not at all bad and it is the present and future of doing business.
If we were not already equipped with digitalization then we suffer more as we have done the compliances in the predefined manner or no compliance till everything come to back to normal.
Below is the exemplar mentioning what shall be the normal course of compliances and what are the changes due to Covid-19:
| Particular | Actions in normal course | Change due to Covid-19 |
| Board meetings | One meeting in a year had to be held in Physical Mode | All the meeting can be conducted through virtual medium |
| Financials and Board Report, etc. | Can be approved in physical meeting only | Can be approved through virtual medium |
| AGM/EGM | Held only in Physical Mode | Can be held through virtual medium |
| ROC filings | Has to be filed on their due date | Moratorium up to September 30, 2020 has been given for 76 e-forms. |
| AGM | Tentative last date of conducting AGM for all companies is September 30, 2020 | Extended up to Dec 31, 2020 |
And other several relaxations related to CSR, Deposits, Ids Data Bank, CFSS, LLP settlement scheme, Charges, CARO, MSME, Annual formation, Cost Audit Report and Indian Accounting Standards.
If we have not been prepared and business were not sufficient enough to understand technology then there will be a great threat to the organisations as this will halt still the decision making procedure of companies and pose a threat to the term “going concern” which entrust the stakeholders in the Business.
