Accreditation of Company Secretaries

The Companies Act 2003 lists, amongst others, the members of the Botswana Institute of Chartered Accountants as qualifying to be Company Secretaries for public and non-exempt private companies.  In order to uphold the Institute’s obligation of Public Interest Protection, it was agreed that some form of accreditation should be put in place to ensure that its members are competent to perform this role.

At its meeting of April 8, 2008 Council resolved that Licentiate members were the Category with the highest risk as it was possible that they could be members without having done any company law at any stage during their studies.  Consequently it was agreed that Licentiate members needed to be accredited before they could practise as company secretaries. The accreditation criteria was agreed as follows:

• The individual should be a Licentiate member of the Botswana Institute of Chartered Accountants.
• The member should have a registered company or registered name.
• The member should have a place of business.  It was clarified that this did not necessarily mean a business office but a traceable address like a residential place would suffice.
• The member should have had at least 2 years of working experience in a company secretarial work environment.
• The member should have accumulated 10 hrs verifiable CPD in company secretarial training/learning in the preceding year.
• A fee of P500 should be charged to meet the cost of administering the system.

It was also agreed that the Institute should continue to support a national level accreditation effort coordinated by the Registrar of Companies through the Company Secretarial Practitioners Forum.

All Licentiate members of BICA are therefore informed that they should obtain BICA accreditation before they could perform the role of company secretary of any public or non-exempt private company in Botswana.

Please contact Pinkie K Modisa on telephone number 3972992 or e-mail kmodisa@bica.org.bw for any further clarification.

By Order of Council.