The territory’s corporate services providers managed to implement the new Beneficial Ownership Secure Search System requirements without major hiccups by their Friday deadline, according to officials involved in the process.

“Everything went virtually seamless,” said Ryan Geluk, deputy managing director of BDO Ltd, the company government paid at least $745,000 to establish BOSSS.

All 132 registered agents established their own secure data repositories on the BOSSS’s cloud-based system, and only one had a technical issue, Mr. Geluk explained.

Spurred by an exchange-of-notes agreement signed between the Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom in April 2016, the BOSSS theoretically equips government investigators with the ability to rapidly provide beneficial ownership information to UK law enforcement.

Based off of that agreement and local legislation passed in May, all of the territory’s registered agents had until Friday to digitise the current ownership information for companies they have incorporated and upload that information onto the BOSSS’s cloud.

“BOSSS is a truly innovative platform that puts the BVI at the helm of global initiatives to combat trans-border crime and illicit financial activity,” Neil Smith, government’s BOSSS coordinator, said in a press release.

Errol George, director of the Financial Investigation Agency, told the Beacon on Monday that the system appeared to be running smoothly.

Mr. George said the FIA had not yet received any information requests from the UK, but was conducting internal testing to gauge the system’s reliability.

Mr. Smith, the executive director of the Office of International Business (Regulations), also noted that the Ministry of Finance decided this week to institute a six-month grace period before any of the penalties mentioned in May’s BOSSS Act would apply.

The act slaps a fine of up to $40,000 for any registered agent that fails to log all of the names, birthdates, addresses, and nationalities of the beneficial owners of each company it incorporates.

That grace period, Mr. Smith explained, will give trust firms more time to track down all of that information, which he noted could be tricky to find.

“We saw that they were obviously doing their best,” he said.

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