Why Registrations and Licensing Matter for Growing Businesses

When an organization launches its first manufacturing plant in a state where it has never operated before, it realizes that making the plant functional is easy. Making the plant legal and registering it for operation is where the hard work comes into play. Enrollment in EPF and ESI schemes, registration of gratuity scheme and labour welfare fund, registration of commercial establishment in accordance with the laws of that particular state, safety and welfare registration, each one governed by a separate body, using a separate form, and having separate deadlines, and each one being a pre-requisite for the plant to operate legally rather than something to be done later on. When a logistics company expands its delivery services through gig workers, it finds itself facing an entirely new set of questions owing to the inclusion of gig and platform workers within the scope of social security benefits under the Code on Social Security.

A business that has been functioning the same manner for many years is wondering whether their current registration, which is in line with the law that was repealed subsequently, has any legal validity after the four labour codes are implemented. And another company that is ready to be inspected for the first time wants to know a simpler thing than this, whether their documents would pass the inspection or not. But all these are not just theoretical questions.

An omission of wage registration in accordance with the Code on Wages will become apparent the moment a payroll inspection shows that wages have been paid out of the schedules set out by the Code. A safety certificate that would have sufficed under the older Factories Act may no longer satisfy the requirements of the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, and it would be difficult for a business to know of this until it is brought up by the inspector. The difficulty with compliance lies in the fact that most businesses will be trying to juggle these processes simultaneously.

The function of Corrida Legal is to bear the entire burden of such registration and licensing on behalf of the business, to ensure that the compliance is not a matter of doubt but an established fact the day the authority comes calling. Our service includes end-to-end registrations pertaining to EPF, ESI, gratuity, labour welfare fund, along with the requisite permissions of a commercial establishment and manufacturing unit as per state law required for the operations of the business, services we recently provided for an FMCG company establishing a manufacturing facility.

In cases where a business entity was compliant with the rules and regulations laid out by the previous codes but has not mapped the change brought about by the new codes. We conduct a comparative audit that compares the two and corrects the gaps. A process that recently became necessary for a logistics company, whose gig employees needed to be covered by EPF, ESI, and gratuity under the Social Security Code, an obligation that did not exist some years back and now does. Once all the registration processes have been done, maintaining them becomes another responsibility altogether, which is why we put in place the systems that are geared towards record keeping of wages, statutory registrations, and compliance registers on a continuous basis, such as those required by a chemical manufacturer under the Occupational Safety, Health, and Working Conditions Code.

We represent businesses during them, although that is something that is at the opposite end of what we do from the center of it, since we prefer it if the registration and the record were in order before the inspection even happened. This is also why the compliance with the OSH Code is about practice as well as paperwork, and we assist in ensuring it.