Apr232020
Posted by:Vandana Bhatia
Compliance in times of COVID19
With India under preventive lockdown has resulted in an unprecedented impact on the businesses and economy. Various financial regulators including the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), Reserve Bank of India (RBI), and Securities Exchange Board of India have come up with a slew of relaxations to help companies impacted by COVID 19 outbreak. As work from home and social distancing become a new normal, some major shifts are happening in the way businesses are currently functioning and will function in the future.
The MCA has provided several guidelines on conducting General and board meetings virtually, relaxed timeline, and waived off fees for filing belated returns and eased off the frequency of conducting board meetings. In addition, it has clarified CSR eligibility and included donations in the PM CAREs Fund eligible for CSR contributions.
RBI has provided a special COVID package that gives the lender’s discretion to provide moratorium to its borrowers and has relaxed asset classification and provisioning norms.
SEBI has also relaxed requirements for prior information for board meetings, publishing financial results and certain filings and returns including and not limited to share transfers, shareholding patterns, secretarial compliance report, corporate governance report, investor complaints, certain returns under SEBI SAST Regulations and the time gap between board and audit committee meetings.
The key changes in the compliance requirements from all the 3 regulators are captured in this link.
