The CRO and it's affiliates.

RoastBeefDinner

I'm not new to the CRO and have been filing accounts for 10 years now as well as paying extortionate fines for late filing.

Anyhow my gripe brings me to it's practice of selling/allowing 3rd party or should I say private "entrepreneurs" access to all financial and personal details it currently holds on record.
These 3rd parties then proceed to publish said information on the web and blatantly and ignorantly alllow the spiders to index everything, up to and including directors date of birth.
Now I know that as a company director the public is entitled to view submissions and or names and address's of directors but is publishing a DOB really necessary?

What is really odd is the latest bozo's to try and cash in on the personal information of company directors is duedil-dot-com which offer the information for free?? wtf an english company gives the info away for free and our own CRO charges for it??

Does anyone know which government dept is in charge of the CRO?
Thanks.

smeharg

RoastBeefDinner wrote: »

I'm not new to the CRO and have been filing accounts for 10 years now as well as paying extortionate fines for late filing.

Anyhow my gripe brings me to it's practice of selling/allowing 3rd party or should I say private "entrepreneurs" access to all financial and personal details it currently holds on record.
These 3rd parties then proceed to publish said information on the web and blatantly and ignorantly alllow the spiders to index everything, up to and including directors date of birth.
Now I know that as a company director the public is entitled to view submissions and or names and address's of directors but is publishing a DOB really necessary?

What is really odd is the latest bozo's to try and cash in on the personal information of company directors is duedil-dot-com which offer the information for free?? wtf an english company gives the info away for free and our own CRO charges for it??

Does anyone know which government dept is in charge of the CRO?
Thanks.

CRO is under the aegis of Dept of Jobs etc.

Information filed with CRO in respect of limited liability companies is publicly available - that's one of prices you pay for limited liability.

You do raise an interesting point though regarding personal data being readily and freely available in an era of identity fraud. It's one that's possibly worth debating.

The CRO charges these companies to which you refer for the information. It is up to those companies to decide how they charge, if at all.

When this information first became available online CRO sought to give free access. However, a private operation successfully challenged it in the High Court and CRO was forced to charge fees.

RoastBeefDinner

This was the reply from the CRO office today;

"Any person is entitled to inspect any documents held by the registrar of
companies, pursuant to Section 370(1)(a) of the 1963 Act, as amended.
Data protection legislation does not apply to information held by the CRO,
including company officers' personal details, as per the Data Protection
Commissioner's website

http://www.dataprotection.ie/viewdoc.asp?DocID=178

Members of the public are entitled to inspect any statutory forms placed on
the CRO register pursuant to the Companies Acts 1963-2009 and/or
Registration of Business Names Act 1963, including forms setting out
directors' details.

The provision of such information is not covered by the Data Protection
Acts 1988-2003, being "personal data consisting of information that the
person keeping the data is required by law to make available to the
public".

This issue arose with solocheck about 5 years ago. I found all our directors FULL birth dates indexed by google. I contacted solocheck directly and they promptly removed all birth dates of director's from the search engine's directory.


Now, if I have understood this correctly, the CRO are using a 1963 Act and an outdated data protection Act to sell off personal information to third parties.
I have no beef if they are using third parties that are covered under Irish Legislation/Data protection and are recognised by Irish Courts,
but to sell off data to areas which do not recognize the Irish courts or are governed by overseas law is in my view a betrayal of the trust that company directories have placed with the CRO.