Open Letter to CIPRO

Update: Also sent to Rob Davies, Minister for Trade and Industry. No reply realistically expected from anybody.

14 July 2010

Chief Executive Officer, CIPRO

Re: Annual Returns

Sir,

See you in court.

Your organisation's handling of the matter of annual returns for Close Corporations has been handled in a completely unacceptable, unconstitutional, unfair, uninformative, unfriendly and unlawful manner.

The first information I received concerning this new requirement for submitting an annual return, along with extorting yet more money from your unwilling victims, was a letter threatening to de-register this CC. Normal business practise is to send an invoice, perhaps a statement, maybe even a brief note of explanation. But to open a conversation with threats? Unacceptable. This letter of threat then went on to give 90 days for us to act on it. It arrived 100 days after the date of the letter. Sheer incompetence. I know the Post Office's track record is not so good, but not even they take that long to deliver a letter. So it must, logically, have been delayed within CIPRO itself.

I attempted to contact CIPRO via your call-centre. After extremely long times on hold in the call queue, being charged at premium-rate phone rates, and after never having the phone answered by a human being, I attempted to find other contact phone numbers. To no avail. Evidently you are so ashamed of the high-handed manner in which you act that you are afraid of actual contact with your victims. I dare-say you are right to feel so.
I immediately (email 10 June 2010) contacted your organisation with my full contact details, requesting information, since I had no clue what this was about at that stage. Well done on providing information. It took fully 8 days before I received a reply (email 18 June), informing me of the requirement for submitting a return, and requiring me to register on your website.

Unfortunately the CIPRO website clearly and unambiguously states on its front page, “Customers must use Internet Explorer for any CIPRO transaction. “ Unfortunately this organisation does not possess any copies of Internet Explorer, nor are we technically able to use this software, since Internet Explorer only runs under the Microsoft Windows Operating System, and we exclusively use the Linux Operating System. We are therefore unable to legally comply with this condition of use of your website. Your Terms and Conditions make it clear that, in the case that we are unable or unwilling to accept your Conditions, our only remedy is to not use your website. OK – fine with me. I informed your organisation of our inability to comply with this requirement on 21 June (email 21 June 2010) and requested an alternative means to comply with your requirements. No reply was forthcoming.

I queried this matter again (email 29 June 2010) and was advised to phone your call centre again (email 29 June 2010). Once again I was unable to get through to your call centre, and informed your help-desk of this (email 29 June 2010).
I received a request for my contact details (email 30 June 2010) so that a consultant could contact me regarding this matter. Despite the fact that I had already supplied these details, I immediately complied (email 30 June 2010). On 2 July at approx. 14h00 I was contacted by your consultant Kate, and I explained the problem to her. She informed me that she would have to “consult with IT” to determine an alternative method of achieving compliance. I heard nothing further.

I again enquired on 12 July (email 12 July 2010) and received the snotty response “Further to our reply dated 30.06.2010, requesting your contact details and no response from you?” Clearly your help-desk is incompetent to keep track of simple stuff like contact details that have already been sent twice. I immediately responded (email 12 July 2010) explaining when details had been sent and the contact I had already received without any outcome.
No response.

I again enquired (email 13 July 2010) and was again told (email 14 July 2010) to send my contact details. What are you people up to? Let us not mention the fact that you allegedly keep track of all the details of all companies and CCs, so you already have those contact details on file as part of the CC's registration. Or have you lost the records? I responded – again (email 14 July 2010). Most recently was an email from Grace Masuku (email 14 July 2010) again requesting my contact details which have been supplied – again (email 14 July 2010.)

I ask you, with tears in my eyes...

So to sum up:

• You require us to submit some return and pay you some extortion money. You didn't bother to actually let anyone know. It may surprise you to learn that most of us do not ordinarily read the Government Gazette and you clearly made no effort to actually contact your intended victims.
• You require that submission to be via your website.
• Simultaneously you make it impossible for some of us to legally comply by imposing terms and conditions of use of your website that we are unable to meet.
• You have failed to provide any alternative means of compliance.

Despite many good-faith attempts to comply we are no closer to a resolution.

There is not a Magistrate nor a Judge in the land who will find in your favour on this.

Oh, yes! You would like us to register as “Customers” and pride yourselves on the “Service” you provide to us “Customers”. I have news for you: “Customers” have

• Freedom to choose another supplier.
• Freedom to choose not to buy the service being sold.

We have no such choices.

That makes us “Unwilling Victims”, not “Customers”. Victims of government's determination to suck every last drop of blood from small businesses such as ours. Every time we turn around to try and make an honest, law-abiding living in an entrepreneurial way, we get another road-block thrown in our path. It has become so onerous to comply with all the conditions, reports, manuals, return and payment upon tax upon levy upon payment that it is pretty much not worth the effort any longer. Much simpler to disappear into the cash economy where you will find it impossible to extort yet more money from us. The entire edifice of government has become nothing more than a blood-sucking parasite on the economy of ordinary people, and CIPRO the most excellent exemplar of that parasitism.

Your "Reaching Out" document (sent, I note, in the proprietary and closed MS Word format instead of an open, standards-compliant and accessible format as would be in line with governments alleged commitment to the use of Open Source software and open standards – fortunately my Open Source word processor can cope reasonably well with this closed format) claims that the annual fine is needed "to update information kept by an Office of the Registrar". What rubbish! We are already legally obliged to notify the Registrar of any changes to that information. It is nothing but another vampire tax to fund fat-cat officials and gravy-train robbers. Reference to CIPRO's own recent embarrassments in this regard is obvious.

Damned if we do, and damned if we don't.

See you in court if you make any attempt to unlawfully deregister this CC.