Meeting Elevated Governance Standards: Company Secretarial for Professional Practices

Two Different Regulators, Two Different Standards

CIPC has never asked whether an attorney holds a current Fidelity Fund Certificate. The Financial Sector Conduct Authority has never checked whether a company’s annual return was filed on time. Yet both questions matter enormously to a professional practice, and treating them as one and the same compliance exercise is where things start to go wrong.

Many professional practices assume that once their Companies Act obligations are in order, their governance position is settled. For a standard trading company, that’s largely true. For an accounting firm, a law practice, a healthcare provider or a financial services business, it’s only half the picture. OAK Law’s company secretarial services for professional entities are built specifically around closing that second half.

What the Companies Act Actually Covers

The Companies Act 71 of 2008 sets the baseline every registered company must meet: filing annual returns with CIPC, maintaining statutory registers, keeping a current Memorandum of Incorporation, and observing directors’ duties. This applies uniformly, whether the company sells software or provides medical advice. It’s a solid floor, but it was never designed with sector-specific accreditation in mind.

The Layer Regulators Add on Top

Professional bodies build a second, more personal layer of obligation over that floor, and the requirements differ sharply by sector.

Under the FAIS Act, a licensed financial services provider must appoint at least one Key Individual approved by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority to manage and oversee the business, and where the FSP has more than one Key Individual or a certain number of representatives, an approved Compliance Officer as well. Neither role has an equivalent under the Companies Act. A company can have a perfectly compliant board of directors and still be operating without a valid Key Individual approval in place.

Under the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, attorneys practising for their own account, or as a director of a law practice structured as a juristic entity, must hold a current Fidelity Fund Certificate before they may touch client funds. Obtaining and renewing it depends on a separate annual trust account audit being submitted to the Legal Practice Council, a requirement that runs entirely independently of CIPC’s annual return cycle.

Accounting and healthcare practices face comparable additional layers of their own, from practice reviews to professional registration requirements, each administered by a different body with its own calendar and its own consequences for lapsing.

Why the Gap Catches Practices Off Guard

The risk isn’t that practice owners ignore these requirements outright. It’s that the two systems don’t talk to each other. CIPC has no visibility into whether a Fidelity Fund Certificate has lapsed, and the FSCA has no visibility into a company’s CIPC standing. A practice can look entirely compliant on one system while quietly falling out of step on the other, often until a regulator’s own review brings it to light.

Closing the Gap With One Coordinated Framework

The fix isn’t to treat these as two separate compliance projects running on their own timelines. It’s to map both sets of obligations, statutory and professional, onto a single framework and a single calendar, so a renewal date on one side never gets lost in the noise of the other. This is where a company secretarial provider with legal oversight adds real value: reading both the Companies Act requirement and the professional body’s rule at the same time, rather than administering one and hoping the other is being handled elsewhere.

A Quick Self-Check

A few questions worth asking right now:

• Do you know your professional body’s renewal or certification date, separately from your CIPC annual return anniversary?
• If your Key Individual, compliance officer, or Fidelity Fund Certificate holder left tomorrow, would your practice still meet its regulatory requirements the next day?
• Has anyone reviewed your statutory and professional obligations together, on one timeline, in the last twelve months?

If any of these gives you pause, that’s the gap worth closing first.

Gereelde Vrae

Does filing my annual return with CIPC satisfy my professional body’s requirements too? No. CIPC compliance and professional body accreditation are assessed separately, by different regulators, against different standards.

What happens if my professional registration lapses but my company stays in good standing with CIPC? Your company may still be trading legally under company law, but you may not be permitted to practise or render the regulated service until the professional requirement is restored.

Can these two layers be managed by the same provider? Yes. A company secretarial provider with legal expertise can track both sets of obligations on one framework, which is the most reliable way to prevent one from slipping while attention is on the other.

Getting Both Layers Under One Framework

Companies Act compliance is necessary, but for a regulated practice, it was never meant to be sufficient on its own. Closing the gap between statutory compliance and your professional body’s expectations is a coordination problem, and it has a coordination solution.

Explore our company secretarial services for professional entities or kontak OAK Law to arrange a compliance health check that looks at both layers together.