Late last year, we wrote about the need for primary producers with an interest in goods supplied to someone to register the interest on the Personal Properties Secrities Register so that they could obtain the protecions provided by the Personal Properties Secrities Act 2009.
Those protections include maintaining an interest in the goods supplied and being goven a priority interest in those goods ahead of others who may have registered an interest in goods held by that person or company.
You can think of the PPSR as the equivalent of writing your name on an esky before lending it to someone.
Thankfully, most producers are aware of the need to register the interest on the PPSR to protect what is being supplied and ensured that they are not left empty handed.
What primary producers and others with interests registered on the PPSR may not be aware of is that January 30 marked the seven-year anniversary of the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 and the PPSR coming into operation.
With a seven-year registration being the typical term of registration, many certificates expired at the end of January unless they were renewed.
Using the esky analogy, consider the PPSR the equivalent of writing your name on an esky before lending it to someone with the ink lasting as long as your registration is valid.
At the end of the seven-year period, your name automatically wears off and, if you want to make sure everyone knows that it is your esky, you need to write your name back on it before it wears off.
But what happens if you did not renew your registration?
Unfortunately, once a registration expires it cannot be renewed, only re-registered.
The consequence of this is that enforceability and priority are not maintained in the case of an insolvency and the person will end up being an unsecured creditor.
In other words, your name on the esky eventually wears off, which enables someone else to put their name on it - unless you can re-register before another person puts their name on it.
If you want to avoid wondering what happened to that esky, it is est to remembver that the PPSR is not a 'set and forget' system.
If you have previously registered an interest, we would advise checking the date to ensure it is still valid.
This article was published in the Stock Journal on Thursday 14 Febuary 2019.