There are no fees or registrations on the commercial register portal
“With the entry into force of the law for the implementation of the Digitization Directive (DiRUG) on August 1st, 2022, the retrieval of all register contents from the commercial, cooperative, association and partnership register as well as the electronically available documents via the common register portal of the federal states is free of charge from August 1st, 2022 offered”, writes the commercial register in a note on its online register portal. Registration and login are no longer necessary from this point on. Before the change, this looked very different. For inquiries, applicants had to set up an account on the portal and pay fees that were sometimes in the double-digit euro range. But all of that is now history due to an amendment to the law. With the DiRUG, the specifications of the EU Directive 2019/1151 are adopted in Germany. The changes aim to make it easier to set up companies online across Europe and make the retrieval and exchange of information more cost-effective and accessible.
Free digital access can be very useful
The elimination of fees and free access to the extracts from the commercial register offers many advantages. In some cases, users not only save a lot of money that they previously had to spend on retrieval. This removes a considerable hurdle in obtaining information from other potential interest groups. As the website BetriebsratsPraxis24 writes, for example, works councils can now find out for themselves inexpensively and easily about “organizational changes under company law such as takeovers, mergers and changes in shareholders or changes in competence in real managers (granting and expiry of power of attorney)” and are no longer so busy Information requested by management. Christoph Trautvetter, Managing Director of the Tax Justice Network, also stated to the Golem website that from now on it would be easier for tenants to search for the owners of their properties.
Nicolas Flohr / Editor finanzen.net
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