Frustration continues over PPSR

Beverley Head
Monday, 13 February 2012 17:17

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

A fortnight after the $33 million Personal Property Security Register was launched, the system performance is slowly improving - but there remains frustration at the lack of firm commitments regarding system upgrades.

The PPSR was built by Fujitsu for the Attorney General's department and has endured a fraught first fortnight, described as 'exceptionally challenging' by Moses Samaha, head of commercial risk for Veda . Mr Samaha said that the performance of the system today is much better than it was a fortnight ago, when it first launched, but there remain issues, particularly regarding the data migrated from ASIC databases which was missing Australian Company Numbers.

The PPSR website is still featuring a warning about system performance, and thanking users for their patience.  

Mr Samaha said that such was the poor performance of the system when first launched, Veda felt obliged to waive its clients' PPSR usage fees for the first few days, although it has since reinstated charges.

He said that the system performance was improving, but that there remained some limitations. 'The Attorney General's (department) is working through that but there are no commitments about time which is a little frustrating,' said Mr Samaha.

Veda's clients access the PPSR system via Veda's front end systems, and Mr Samaha said that that continued delays 'put us in a bit of a predicament as we don't want people to think it's us' causing the delays.

Nevertheless he said that the PPSR search facility was getting a little better and more consistent. He said that in the first days of the Register's operation the search function was stalling,  prompting users to start searches again which led to a backlog of searches quickly developing.