New company registrations stall as OTPs stop arriving

New company registrations in Nepal have stalled after the one-time passwords needed to complete the online process stopped arriving on applicants' mobile phones.

The Office of the Company Registrar says the one-time password is mandatory both to propose a new company name and to move a registration application forward. With no password generated, applicants cannot get past the first steps, and their work has simply stopped.

The office blames a fault in the server of the Department of Information Technology. Its information officer, Nirman Kumar Karki, said the department's system failure means the passwords are not being generated at all.

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The trouble is not new. Karki said it first appeared last Thursday and Friday, when passwords failed to arrive for three consecutive days and registration work came to a complete halt. The system worked briefly on Monday before the problem returned.

The system has not shut down entirely, Karki said. Instead it works in fits and starts, sometimes processing applications and sometimes stopping altogether. He said a software update or change may have triggered the fault, and acknowledged the registrar's own internal system has also had minor problems.

Service seekers have been complaining continuously that their registration work is not moving, the office said. It explained the delay as a problem in the information technology department's system.

The Department of Information Technology says work is under way to fix the fault. Its information officer, Prakash Dawadi, said the system will resume fully soon and company registration work will return to normal.

Until the fix is complete, applicants face an uncertain wait before they can complete a registration.