If you are behind
Your reports are overdue. Here’s what happens next.
Late lodgement is common and it is fixable. Corporations that have not lodged appear on a public list maintained by the Registrar, and continued non-lodgement can lead to compliance action. The position is recoverable, and the first step is establishing which years and which reports are outstanding.
You are not the first
If you have just discovered your corporation is behind, maybe by joining a board or starting as CEO or opening a letter nobody else opened, the useful thing to know is that this is ordinary. Corporations fall behind for entirely understandable reasons: a bookkeeper left, a funding round consumed everyone’s year, records were kept by someone who has moved on.
None of that is a reason to avoid dealing with it, and none of it makes the corporation unusual.
What actually happens
The Registrar publishes a list of corporations that have not lodged their reports. That is the first practical consequence, and for most corporations it is the one that bites: funders look, banks look, and anyone deciding whether to work with your corporation can look.
Checked against ORIC — Corporations with reports not lodged, .
Where non-compliance continues, the Registrar has powers to escalate, including issuing a compliance notice, which is an instruction to the corporation to fix something. Failing to comply with one is itself a ground on which a special administrator can be appointed.
Two things about that process are worth knowing now, because they change what you should do this week.
A compliance notice does not usually arrive without warning. Before issuing a final notice the Registrar will usually send a draft first and allow the corporation around 14 days to comment, and those comments feed into whether a final notice is issued at all. If a draft has landed on your desk, that is the moment to engage, not to go quiet.
Compliance notices are public. They are published on the Registrar’s website, as is the letter confirming the matter is closed once the required actions are done. Getting to that second document is the goal.
The full sequence, from draft to notice to monitoring and what happens if a corporation does not act, is set out in our guide to what to do about a compliance notice.
What to do this week
None of these require you to have your records in order, and none of them commit you to anything.
- Find your ICN. Your corporation’s number is on the register and on any correspondence from ORIC. Everything else is easier once you have it.
- Look up what is actually outstanding. The public register shows what has been lodged and what has not. Boards are often wrong about this in both directions, assuming years are missing that were lodged, or the reverse.
- Gather whatever exists. Bank statements, grant agreements, invoices, payroll records. Do not wait until the records are complete; they will not be.
- Check who the current contact and directors are. If ORIC has been writing to someone who left three years ago, that alone can explain how a corporation got here.
If the records are missing or incomplete
This is the real blocker for most corporations, and the reason people put off starting. Incomplete records are normal in catch-up work, and they are not a dead end.
Accounts can be reconstructed. Bank statements give you the transactions. Grant agreements tell you what money was for and what conditions attached to it. Payroll records and invoices fill in the rest. It is more work than a clean year, and entirely doable. A corporation several years behind with a shoebox of paperwork is a recognisable situation, not a hopeless one.
What genuinely does get harder with time is memory: the people who know what a payment was for move on. That is the real argument for starting sooner, and a better one than fear of the regulator.
How we would approach it
- Establish what is outstanding — from the public register, before you commit to anything.
- Work out what records exist and what has to be reconstructed.
- Prepare in year order, because each year’s closing position is the next year’s opening position.
- Bring in an auditor where the years in question require one, and manage their queries.
- Get the board comfortable — directors have to approve what is lodged, so they need to understand it.
A first step that costs nothing
Tell us your corporation’s name. We will check the public register and tell you plainly which years and which reports are outstanding, and roughly what it would take to bring the corporation up to date. No obligation, and no pressure if you decide to handle it yourselves or with someone else.
Frequently asked questions
How far behind is too far behind?
There is no point at which it becomes not worth fixing. Corporations come back from several years of non-lodgement. What matters is starting, because the position is public and it does not improve on its own.
We do not have proper records for those years. Can anything be done?
Usually yes. Accounts can be reconstructed from bank statements, grant agreements, invoices and payroll records — that is normal catch-up work, not a special case. Missing paperwork is a reason to start, not a reason to wait.
Will the directors get in trouble personally?
Directors are responsible for making sure reports are lodged, so it is a real responsibility rather than a formality. What that means in a specific case depends on the circumstances, and it is worth getting advice about your own situation rather than assuming the worst from a website.
Can we just lodge the most recent year and move on?
Generally no — outstanding years stay outstanding. It is usually better to work through them in order, because each year’s closing position becomes the next year’s opening position.
How do we find out exactly what is outstanding?
The Registrar publishes which corporations have not lodged, and the register shows what has been received. You can look it up yourself, or tell us your corporation’s name and we will check it and tell you what is missing.