Australia Proprietary Company Registration (ASIC Form 201, Corporations Act 2001)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-03

The document was derived from ASIC's own regulatory-resources confirmation of Form 201's current status, business.gov.au's live guidance on the modern fee and channel, and the Form 201 PDF's own printed field set — but the live online lodgement channel (register.business.gov.au, myGovID/RAM-gated) was not reached, so the practice's field-by-field comparison against a live screen set has not been completed. It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): au/asic/proprietary-company-registration / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the national companies regulator under the Corporations Act 2001.
• Process guidance: https://www.asic.gov.au/regulatory-resources/forms/forms-folder/201-application-for-registration-as-an-australian-company/, fetched live 2026-07-03 (raw HTML, not a summarizer), confirms Form 201 remains ASIC's current regulatory form for this process. The page's own content is limited to "Use Form 201 to register a new Australian company" plus lodgement and fee details (201A/201B/201C denote fee categories for the same form, not distinct page counts or field descriptions) — it does not describe the form's page count or field contents; those were verified directly against the retrieved PDF itself (8 pages total, "Page 1 of 8" through "Page 8 of 8", with the lodgement-details/cover content embedded in page 1 rather than a separate page). Fee and modern-channel confirmation from business.gov.au live search results: "you must register it on the Australian companies register, managed by ASIC. The fee is $636 from 1 July 2026 ($611 until 30 June 2026)" and "you can use the Australian Government Business Registration Service at register.business.gov.au to handle multiple registrations in one place."
• Primary form source: ASIC Form 201, "Application for registration as an Australian company" (Corporations Act 2001, s117), footer-dated 17 January 2011 — the edition still linked from ASIC's own current forms page. The direct asic.gov.au/download.asic.gov.au link resolved to an unrelated resource in this sandbox (not a valid PDF), so the form was instead retrieved from a long-established third-party form-library mirror (calculus.net.au), consistent with the "retired/hard-to-reach official form, sourced via a stable third-party mirror" technique already used for several FR Cerfa forms in this registry.
• PDF extraction method: the retrieved PDF has a genuine text layer (not scanned, not AcroForm-only) — pdfjs-dist's getTextContent() returned the complete printed instructional text of every numbered section verbatim, which every field's sourceRef quotes directly.
• Scope decision — proprietary company limited by shares only: Form 201 covers both proprietary and public companies, which branch significantly (a public company needs ≥3 directors including 2 Australia-resident, a mandatory Australia-resident secretary, published office hours, and in several cases a lodged constitution and ultimate-holding-company disclosure). This version models only the proprietary-company path — by far the dominant case for an individual or small group incorporating a business, and the AU jurisdiction's closest analogue to the "LLC / Incorporation" scope named in this vertical's brief. The following source sections are consequently out of scope for this version:
  • The public-company governance block (constitution lodgement, "relies entirely on replaceable rules" declaration, published office hours, special-purpose-company declaration under the Corporations (Review Fees) Regulations 2003).
  • Section 4, "Identify ultimate holding company" (relevant chiefly to public companies and wholly-owned subsidiaries).
  • The minimum-3-director/2-resident governance rule, which does not apply to a proprietary company.
  • A third-or-later officeholder or member: the source form supports repeating officeholder/member blocks (with photocopied extra pages for more than a handful); this schema models a first and second director, an optional secretary, and a first member only — additional officeholders/members are a natural follow-up extension, not modelled as a repeating group in this version.
  • Form 207Z/Form 208 lodgement obligations that follow from areSharesIssuedOtherThanForCash: true with a written contract: the source form directs the applicant to lodge those as separate forms, which this schema surfaces only implicitly (via the boolean field) and does not model as its own document requirement.
• Requiredness for optional address subfields: director1AddressState and director1AddressPostcode are modelled required: false even though a real submission would need them, because the source form does not visually distinguish their requiredness from the director's country field (which is genuinely optional, "if not Australia") — left conservative rather than guessed; a live-channel comparison should confirm this.
• Fee amount: modelled at 636 AUD (the post-1-July-2026 amount, matching the review date of 2026-07-03); the pre-1-July-2026 amount of 611 AUD is noted in the field's own sourceRef prose rather than modelled as a second amount, since the spec's amount shape does not support a time-conditional value (the same limitation already noted for the FR passport schema's Guyane fiscal-stamp exception).

Test run (mock data)

Two mock scenarios were run against this schema version's required/ requiredWhen/visibleWhen gating logic with the same standalone validator script used for the two FR schemas authored earlier this cycle (not committed — mirrors the checks tools/validate.mjs and tools/validate-ajv.mjs already run structurally):

1. A single-director company occupying its own registered office, no secretary, one member holding fully-paid ordinary shares for cash — confirms the "occupies own office" / "principal place same as registered office" / "no second director" / "no secretary" branches all correctly skip their conditional fields. Committed as this version's conformance/.../application-packet.json fixture.
2. A two-director company using a registered agent's office it does not itself occupy, a separate principal place of business, an appointed secretary, and shares issued other than for cash — exercises every conditional branch simultaneously. A deliberately broken variant (with occupierConsentGiven omitted) correctly failed with MISSING required field: occupierConsentGiven, confirming the gate fires; restoring the field passed. Not committed as a fixture (single-packet-per-version convention), but recorded here as the branch coverage this version's conditional logic received.

Both tools/validate.mjs and tools/validate-ajv.mjs (full JSON Schema 2020-12 meta-schema, ajv) pass for this document.

Known gaps / future work

• Reach the live Business Registration Service screen flow (requires myGovID/RAM authentication) to confirm this schema's field set and gating match the actual online experience, not just the paper form.
• Model the public-company governance path as a sibling or extension.
• Model a third-or-later officeholder/member as a repeating structure once the spec has a clearer convention for it (several other schemas in this registry hit the same limitation, e.g. fr/inpi/micro-entrepreneur-activity-declaration's single-employer-of-record scope).
• A companion ABN-only application (business.gov.au) for the sole-trader (non-company) case remains a distinct, narrower candidate.

Scope

Out of scope for this version: public company registration, ultimate holding-company disclosure, a third-or-later officeholder or member, and Form 207Z/208 follow-on lodgements for non-cash share issuances.