How to register your society/association in Malaysia

In earlier posts, we looked at an overview of the registration process, and talked about the first step of getting your executive committee together and working out who is going to be responsible for which areas, in terms of managing the society and the secretariat.

In today's post, we're going to look at registering your society on the eROSes portal at www.ros.gov.my.

Basically, the Registrar of Societies no longer accepts submissions of physical documents over-the-counter. The entire system has migrated online to a portal called eROSes. Under the new system, all documentation must be submitted electronically.

Step 1 is the creation of a user login and profile. Note that the person creating the profile, must be the Secretary of the society. It cannot be the President, Treasurer or any other office-bearer. The Secretary is the sole point of contact as far as the eROSes portal is concerned. Therefore, it would be a good idea to ensure that the Secretary has a very good command of Bahasa Malaysia as most of the content on the eROSes portal is in Bahasa Malaysia.

Once login details, passwords etc have been created, the user must key in various details into the text boxes provided on the portal, which appear when the various headings are clicked on. To populate the text boxes, it would be a good idea to have all the data already keyed into separate word documents, so that you can just copy and paste the info into the text boxes instead of typing everything from scratch. (Besides saving time, this could help you avoid loss of data if you are accidentally logged out of the system, or the system hangs and your data is lost).

Two final points – firstly, you can save data already keyed in and exit any number of times while you are working on completing the details. There is no need to complete everything at one go. You can actually take your time to compile all the information, and only click “submit” once everything is ready. Secondly, there is no option to attach word or excel documents. Data has to be copied and pasted, or keyed into the text boxes manually. So even for the constitution, you are required to key in the information paragraph by paragraph.

For a better understanding of the process and content that needs to be compiled, have a look at the very comprehensive and detailed eROSES Manual published by the Registry of Societies, entitled “Panduan Pengguna Sistem Elektronik Jabatan Pendaftaran Pertubuhan Malaysia”. Download it at http://www.ros.gov.my/files/supp_docs/Panduan_pengguna_eroses%20upload.pdf

There is also an online tutorial which ROS has uploaded, guiding you through the process step-by-step process. Go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdNbABd7830.

If it all looks too confusing, just save your softcopies on a thumbdrive and head to the ROS branch office in your home state. Check out http://www.ros.gov.my/index.php/my/jppm-negeri for a list of state branches.

In Wilayah Persekutuan, the office is located in the Jln. Duta government complex. There are several PC’s available for members of the public, and the officers at the counter are be happy to assist you set up a user profile or help you solve technical issues on the portal. Or you could bring along your own laptop and a broadband connection and get one of the officers to help you with your question/problem.

Wilayah Persekutuan
Jabatan Pendaftaran Pertubuhan Malaysia Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur,
Aras G, Kompleks Kementerian Dalam Negeri,
Jalan Sri Hartamas Off Jalan Duta,
50480 Kuala Lumpur.
Telefon : 03 - 62012092 / 03 - 62012093 / 03 - 62012094 /03-62012095 / 03-62012096
No. Faks : 03 – 62012107

For more general info, check out the ROS website at http://www.ros.gov.my/index.php/en/