As part of measures to further ensure that unclaimed dividend menace becomes extinct in Nigeria’s lexicon, the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), at the weekend published a proposed amendment to its Rule 39 on annual reports, among others that may be adopted after public consideration of the exposure draft.
According to the rule, companies are now required to make in their quarterly and audited accounts, disclosures of their “unclaimed dividend fund with respect to bank balance, investments and earned income by way of notes to the audited accounts and other periodic reports filed with the Commission.”
The proposed rule is coming barely days after the commission in another exposure draft is seeking to require that company registrars to ensure bank accounts of shareholders how have duly concluded the electronic dividend mandate are credited with all their outstanding dividends within two days (READ MORE).
This, it said, is in addition to requiring that “the annual report to be filed with the Commission shall in all material facts comply with the relevant accounting standard.”
The amendment also requires that external editors shall state in their annual report of public companies, the level of compliance with the Code of Corporate Governance for public companies as contained in schedule X of these rules and regulation.
The auditor shall in the “audit report to the company issue a statement as to the existence, adequacy and effectiveness or otherwise of the internal control system of the company.”
Failure by any public company to file such annual report with the Commission, according to the proposed rule “shall be liable to a fine of N1m and the sum of N25,000 for every day the default continues.”