Yes, you need one. No loopholes here. Incorporating a company in Singapore, you have no choice but to leave a corporate secretary. The law gives you six months when incorporated and you can sort it out thereafter.
It is a sort of a ceremony. The other title to fill. The position is more than meets the eye. Visit our recommended site related our campaign!
A corporate secretary is in charge of compliance. It is a term that is frequently used and in practice just means making sure that your company is on time with filing dates, the statutory registers and that any change of company, a new director or other shareholder, is duly registered. Lose a little, and you have no long to lose a lot.
I have also seen founders not consider this at the very outset thinking that they will deal with this later once the business picks up. Then time elapses, penalties are imposed and within no time it turns into an emergency. Singapore is not much of a subtle reminder. It expects you to be conscious of your responsibilities.
The legal legal requirement is not a complex one. The secretary is to be a resident of Singapore. It could be an individual or a business that provides business services. When you have just one director in your company then he or she cannot be the secretary. That rule is more likely to get people caught than you may have guessed.
The usual route is by outsourcing. Most small businesses do not accomplish this by hiring someone internally. Instead, they are partnering with those companies that bundle secretary services into annual packages. It can be done and is likely to be cheap in comparison with hiring workers. It is based on the prices but is normally in hundreds of dollars every year.
Cost is not as important as responsiveness. You will shortly experience this when your secretary needs days to get back or give you inaccurate answers. You can just miss filings just because of a communication break down. That is frustrating, especially when the whole point of the job is to make sure that things are comfortably proceeding in the background.
People do not talk enough about a little merit. A good corporate secretary is not just one who files documents, he identifies problems at the beginning. Your share structure, perhaps, needs to be revised, or a decision must be made beforehand. They spot such things before they turn out to be a problem.
The corporate secretary in Singapore is also like an intermediate between you and the regulators. You do not exercise every particular. They will help to de-require requirements so that you can actually do something about, which will save time and cause less confusion.
It is not the most desirable aspect of business operation. No one starts a business with the idea that he or she will become a secretary. But, think on it, or at least do it sparingly, and it proves to be one of those unspoken sources of stress that keeps on reoccurring at the most inopportune time.