Investors will now be in a position to lodge complaints or send reminders at any time and from anywhere, with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (
Sebi ) launching a centralised Web-based complaint redressal system.
The facility, called Scores, keeps track of the
redressal of the complaint and makes it amenable to audit.
Earlier, complaints were made in physical format, making it difficult to track the redressal.
The new system would enable investors to lodge and follow up on their complaints and track the status of redressal from anywhere.
This would also enable market intermediaries and listed companies to receive complaints from investors against them, redress such grievances and report redressal.
"All activities, starting from lodging of a complaint till its disposal by Sebi, would be carried online in an automated environment and the status of every complaint can be viewed online at any time," Sebi said in a release on Wednesday.
Physical filing of investor complaints is possible even now. An investor who is not familiar with Scores or does not have access to it, can lodge complaints in a physical form. However, such complaints would be scanned and uploaded in Scores for processing, Sebi added.
The Scores facility, developed by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of the government of India, generates an email instantaneously acknowledging the receipt of the complaint and allotting a unique complaint registration number for future reference and tracking.
This sets the process in motion, taking the complaint online to the entity (intermediary or listed company) concerned for its redressal.
The entity concerned uploads an Action Taken Report (ATR) on the complaint. Sebi peruses the ATR and disposes of the complaint if it is satisfied that the complaint has been redressed adequately.
The investor can view the status of the complaint online and the person and the entity concerned can seek and provide clarifications online to each other. Thus, the lifecycle of a complaint has an audit trail, Sebi said.
As all the complaints would be saved in a central database, it would also help generate relevant management information systems (MIS) reports to enable Sebi to take appropriate policy decisions and remedial action.
Courtesy: Mail Today
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