Since the Personal Property Securities Act (PPSA) became operational at the end of January, 2012, there have been a number of issues that have arisen in relation to this important new legalisation.
Understandably with any new system, accessibility and performance may be a challenge. The issue of ASIC migrated charges (now known as security interests under the PPSA) has proved problematic in the PPSR’s initial days.
There appears to have been a searching function issue between ASIC migration data and the Personal Property Securities Register (PPSR), namely an incomplete transfer of selected data. As a consequence, parties have had to undertake multiple searches to find migrated registrations and have, in many cases, been unable to correctly search and identify security interests.
The Attorney General’s PPSA Department has recommended that if you are conducting a search of a security interest(s) on the PPSR, it should be done so using an ABN, ACN and organisation name so as to ensure you can locate or find the relevant migrated security interest. Additionally, the PPSR advises that it has a PDF list of all migrated ABNs and corresponding ACNs to assist users who do not have an ABN to more easily locate the ABN in order to search PPSR.
A key issue for any financier that had a pre PPSA charge registered on ASIC is to ensure an accurate paper trail is retained including records of the original ASIC charges and any copies of corresponding PPSR searches.
A well-documented audit trail may be critical in any future dispute. If your business had a charge registered on the ASIC database pre 30 January 2012, then it should have migrated to the PPSR and it is very important to ensure that the security interest is now reflected on the PPSR. If you cannot locate a migrated charge, we suggest you seek assistance from the PPSR team at ITSA as soon as possible.
We recognise that the PPSA regime is very complex and requires a significant mind shift. It introduces a wide range of new terminology that will also take some getting used to.