Nigeria Application for Registration of Company (CAC Form 1.1)

This file is the source-review record for this document version. It documents the provenance of the published fields/documents and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-12

This is GovSchema Standard Research cycle GOV-2518. It opens Nigeria as GovSchema's 42nd jurisdiction (confirmed by counting ls registry/ before and after — 41 directories before this schema, 42 after), via the Business Formation vertical (1 of 6), using the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC)'s Form 1.1, "Application for Registration of Company". A prior scouting pass (GOV-2507) had flagged this form as reachable and cited a hash, byte size, and widget count; nothing from that prior report was trusted without an independent re-fetch/re-derivation, and doing so surfaced one material correction (the choice-widget count) — see "Sources examined" below.

Sources examined

Source 1 — the CAC Form 1.1 PDF (chosen as source.url)

• URL: https://nigeriainfotrade.fmiti.gov.ng/media/CAC%20Form%201.1.pdf — the Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment's Nigeria Trade Information Portal, a genuine .gov.ng domain. Direct CAC's own domain (cac.gov.ng) returned HTTP 403 on every direct fetch attempted this cycle (both bare curl and via WebFetch), consistent with a WAF blocking this sandbox's network egress rather than the document being withdrawn — disclosed as a limitation, not silently worked around. A candidate news.cac.gov.ng/forms/ page (surfaced via web search) was fetched and found to be an empty/parked WordPress page with no actual form listing — not a usable alternative source.
• Fetched directly via curl: HTTP 200, Content-Type: application/pdf, 415,060 bytes, Last-Modified: Thu, 11 May 2017 16:49:12 GMT, ETag: "caff3c8476cad21:0", sha256: b0c57c0d8b9fc48e0fa5c944e2c8a9e04e8b9ad58b6c4cc2b9c348f86092c07e. This matches the prior scouting pass's cited hash and byte size exactly — a case where the pre-scout held up under independent re-verification, unlike several other cycles' pre-scouted claims in this registry's history.
• pdfjs-dist's getDocument().promise confirms a genuine 4-page AcroForm PDF (IsAcroFormPresent: true via getFieldObjects()).

Source 2 — pdfjs-dist structural extraction (own re-derivation)

• page.getAnnotations() across all 4 pages found 87 real Widget annotations: 23 on page 1, 49 on page 2, 15 on page 3, 0 on page 4 (page 4 is a plain, non-fillable "Notes" page — lettered notes (a)–(k) describing required attachments and filing rules, extracted via getTextContent() for the documents[] sourcing below).
• By type: 75 Tx (text), 9 Ch (choice/combobox), 3 Btn (checkbox) = 87. This corrects the prior scouting pass's cited figure of "3 button, 2 choice" — the actual choice-widget count is 9, not 2, confirmed independently via both getAnnotations()'s per-widget fieldType tally and a second, independent getFieldObjects() pass grouping by fully-qualified field name (see field-name-reuse finding below). The button (checkbox) count of 3 was correct.
• Every widget's generic AcroForm name (Text4, ComboBox1, CheckBox1, etc.) was mapped to its printed caption by rendering each page with pdfjs-dist + node-canvas at 2.5x scale (page.render() to a canvas, written to PNG) and visually cross-checking each widget's rect against the nearest printed text, additionally cross-checked against each text item's own transform-matrix x/y coordinate from getTextContent() — the same coordinate-correlation technique this registry has used repeatedly for out-of-order/generic-named AcroForms (cf. dk/skattestyrelsen GOV-2253, ke/nrb GOV-2500). Both the rendered PNGs and the raw widget/text coordinate dumps were inspected directly, not inferred from labels alone.
• Field-name-reuse finding (verified via getFieldObjects(), not merely assumed from a naming pattern): the choice widget named ComboBox1 (the "ID. Type" dropdown) is genuinely the same fully-qualified AcroForm field, reused across all 4 director slots (Section C, items 1–4) and the individual secretary (Section D) — 5 widget "kids" sharing one field name. ComboBox2 (the "Gender" dropdown) is likewise reused across all 4 director slots — 4 widget kids sharing one field name. In an actual PDF viewer, since PDF form fields are keyed by fully-qualified name, filling in one of these dropdowns would set the same value on every other widget sharing that name — i.e. selecting Director 2's ID type would silently overwrite Director 1's, 3's and 4's ID type too, a genuine authoring defect in the source PDF, not a rendering artifact (confirmed by getFieldObjects() returning one shared field entry per name with multiple id/page kids, exactly the same shape PDF viewers use to synchronize duplicate-named fields). This schema does not preserve that bug: each director/secretary slot's ID-type and gender is modelled as its own independent enum field (director1IdType … director4IdType, secretaryIndividualIdType, director1Gender … director4Gender), since the printed form unambiguously intends one independent selection per person — disclosed here rather than silently "fixed" without comment, per the analogous field-name-reuse-across-repeating-rows precedent from GOV-2338 (no/brreg).
• The Ch widgets' own printed option lists were read directly off the one widget instance per field name that pdfjs-dist populated with a full options array (a pdfjs-dist quirk when multiple widget kids share one field name — only one kid's parsed object carries the merged option list; confirmed by checking every instance of ComboBox1/ComboBox2 and finding the same 4-value/2-value option lists on whichever instance did carry them): ID type = Driver License / International ID Card / International Passport / Voter Card; Gender = Female / Male.
• The 3 Btn (checkbox) widgets — CheckBox1/CheckBox2/CheckBox3 — sit immediately after the printed "LIMITED BY SHARES" / "LIMITED BY GUARANTEE" / "UNLIMITED" captions respectively (confirmed by comparing each checkbox's rect x-coordinate against each caption's text-item x-range in the rendered page-1 image), each independently checkBox:true, radioButton:false, exportValue:"Yes" — i.e. 3 genuinely independent Btn widgets representing one intended mutually-exclusive selection, not a native PDF radio-button group. Modelled as three boolean fields (typeOfCompanyLimitedByShares/typeOfCompanyLimitedByGuarantee/ typeOfCompanyUnlimited) in an exclusivityGroups entry, per this registry's se/polisen/fi/poliisi precedent for the same class of independently-checkable Btn triplet.
• 2 widgets excluded from fields[]: two plain Tx boxes, one each in Section D ("Particulars of Secretary (Individual)") and Section D1 ("Particulars of Secretary (Firm/Corporation)"), sit directly under a printed "Signature:" caption. Per this registry's convention of not modelling raw signature capture as a data field, these are excluded — even though, unlike the 4 individual directors' own "Signature: ___ Date: ___" lines (which this specimen gives no widget at all, confirmed by checking every widget rect against each director block's y-coordinate range and finding none below the last data field in each block), these two Secretary-section boxes are genuine fillable Tx widgets — plausibly because the form's own header instruction is "Form Must be typed and not Handwritten", so a typed name in a "Signature:" box may have been intended as a typed attestation rather than a captured signature. Disclosed as a judgment call: excluded regardless, for consistency with how every other signature-labelled element on this same form (and this registry's general practice) is handled.
• 85 of the 87 widgets are modelled 1:1 as fields[] entries (87 − 2 excluded signature boxes = 85); no widget is silently dropped without explanation and no field is invented without a corresponding widget or an explicitly disclosed cross-reference (see the documents[] notes below, which are sourced from page 4's plain-text Notes rather than any widget).

Source 3 — page 4 "Notes" (plain text, no widgets — sourced for documents[])

Extracted via getTextContent(). Eleven lettered notes (a)–(k) describe attachment/eligibility rules, several of which name concrete supporting documents used to build documents[]:

• (a) ID copy (passport data page / driver's licence / national ID card) for every individual director, subscriber and secretary; non-Nigerians: passport data page only.
• (b) directors must be ≥18 (CAMA 2020 s.257 grounds of disqualification).
• (c)/(d) minors may subscribe (with ≥2 other qualified persons); a minor subscriber's birth certificate (National Population Commission) or passport data page must be attached.
• (e) a corporate-body subscriber/director-nominator needs a board resolution attached; a corporate body registered outside Nigeria needs its certificate of registration (translated if not in English) attached.
• (f) minimum share capital (NGN 10,000 private / NGN 500,000 public; ≥25% of nominal share capital issued at all times) — a validation-relevant rule, not itself a document.
• (g) a company limited by guarantee must not be registered with a share capital; the Commission refers the memorandum to the Attorney-General for approval.
• (h) foreign directors/subscribers using a Nigerian address must attach a residence-permit copy; other foreigners use their residential address in their country of residence.
• (i) the form must be accompanied by duly signed and stamped copies of the memorandum and articles of association, adopting the applicable CAMA Table 'A' model articles unless modified.
• (j) a first director/subscriber may now prepare and present the incorporation documents directly — accredited professionals are "no longer necessary" for this step (material to the Section E/presenter scoping decision below).
• (k) "All asterisked fields on the form are mandatory." Checked and not reproducible: a full-text scan of every text item on pages 1–3 (getTextContent()) found zero * characters anywhere in the extracted caption text. The form's own instructions reference an asterisk-based required-field convention that does not actually appear in this specimen's current text layer — disclosed as an unresolved discrepancy rather than silently assumed away; this schema's own required/requiredWhen judgment calls (below) are made independently of this unusable convention, based on CAMA 2020's own minimum-viable-company rules and each section's own internal structure instead.

Source 4 — legal-currency and current-process check

• Web search confirms the Companies and Allied Matters Act, 2020 (CAMA 2020, Act No. 3 of 2020) is the currently governing companies statute, repealing the Companies and Allied Matters Act, Cap. C20, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004 (itself the successor to the "Companies and Allied Matters Act 1990" this specimen's own cover page still cites, consistent with the form's 2017 last-modified date predating the 2020 reform). This schema cites CAMA 2020 throughout (description, field descriptions for directors' minimum age and the guarantee-company share-capital bar) rather than the stale cover-page year — the same class of "specimen cites an outdated statute year, current schema cites the actually-governing one" correction this registry made for ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company.
• Web search independently confirms CAC's incorporation process is now primarily conducted through CAC's own login-gated Company Registration Portal (iCRP, icrp.cac.gov.ng, "CRP 3.0" as of 2026), requiring an account tied to a mobile phone number or National Identification Number (NIN); the portal captures name reservation, document upload, and fee payment, and issues an electronic certificate of registration — consistent with this registry's established "structural reference over a now-primarily-online process" framing (cf. pe/sunat/formulario-virtual-709-declaracion-renta, uy/dgi/inscripcion-actualizacion-empresas-formulario-0351, ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company). Form 1.1 itself remains currently and unauthenticated reachable (per Source 1) and is still described by multiple current (2026-dated) third-party company-registration guides as "the official consolidated registration document" — one initial WebSearch AI-generated summary claimed Form 1.1 had been "replaced" outright by the online form; per this registry's own documented gotcha about WebSearch's own AI summary occasionally overstating a supersession (cf. GOV-2479's hallucinated Vietnamese circular), this claim was checked against two direct-fetched pages rather than trusted — one (pdfFiller) titles the form "2017-2026 ... Form CAC 1.1", the other (a Medium walkthrough) describes it as still "the official consolidated registration document" filed via a filing agent — neither corroborates an outright replacement. The correct, disclosed framing is: the paper/PDF specimen is a structural reference for what incorporation data CAC collects; the live transaction itself happens on iCRP.

Field inventory and scoping/disclosure decisions

1. Type of Company (typeOfCompanyLimitedByShares / typeOfCompanyLimitedByGuarantee / typeOfCompanyUnlimited) — 3 independent boolean fields in one exclusivityGroups entry (see Source 2 above for why these are 3 independent Btn widgets, not a native radio group or a single enum). Each field is individually required: false (an applicant selects one), matching this registry's se/polisen precedent for the same class of printed 3-option checkbox row — the business rule that some option must be selected is disclosed here in prose rather than modelled with a fabricated cross-field rule, since GovSchema v0.3's exclusivityGroups only expresses "at most one", not "at least one".
2. Section B (authorized share capital) is gated requiredWhen: { any: [typeOfCompanyLimitedByShares equals true, typeOfCompanyUnlimited equals true] } }, not gated on typeOfCompanyLimitedByGuarantee. Per Note (g), a company limited by guarantee must not be registered with a share capital, so Section B does not apply to that type; an unlimited company can have share capital under CAMA 2020 ("unlimited" describes members' liability, not whether the company has shares), so Section B applies to both the shares and unlimited paths. This positive any composition was deliberately used instead of { field: typeOfCompanyLimitedByGuarantee, notEquals: true } — a negation against an optional boolean that could evaluate true (and thus wrongly force Section B as required) whenever the field is simply absent/unanswered, the same class of bug this registry has already flagged for notEquals "" against an optional string field. The positive-composition form has no such absent-field ambiguity.
3. Section C (first directors) has exactly 4 printed slots on the base form itself — no synthetic repeating-group cap was invented; this is the literal number of numbered director blocks (1–4) printed on pages 1–2. director1* fields are required: true (CAMA 2020 s.18/s.271 permits a single director for a small private company, so at least one director's full particulars are required); director2*–director4* are fully optional, since a company may have only one director.
4. director{N}IdType/secretaryIndividualIdType enums use the dropdown's own printed option list verbatim (Driver License, International ID Card, International Passport, Voter Card) — not a value set invented by this schema. Likewise director{N}Gender (Female, Male).
5. Sections D ("Particulars of Secretary (Individual)") and D1 ("Particulars of Secretary (Firm/Corporation)") are both modelled fully optional, field-by-field, with no requiredness gate between them. CAMA 2020 no longer requires every company to have a secretary (small companies are exempt), and the two sections are mutually-exclusive alternatives (an individual secretary vs. a corporate secretary) with no printed selector field on the form to gate a requiredWhen on — the same class of gap this registry's se/skatteverket schema disclosed for its dual Swedish/foreign contact-address blocks. Rather than fabricate a synthetic "hasSecretary"/"secretaryType" field with no corresponding widget, this is disclosed in prose here, per this registry's "spec precision over cleverness" precedent.
6. Section E (Statutory Declaration of Compliance by a Legal Practitioner) is modelled fully optional, field-by-field. Per Note (j), a first director/subscriber may now present the incorporation documents directly without an accredited professional — CAMA 2020's own liberalization of who may file. The form itself has no "N/A, self-filed" toggle for this section, so its optionality is a disclosed judgment call rather than a literal instruction, consistent with Note (j)'s substance. commissionerOrNotaryName (the "Before Me:" line) is completed by the Commissioner of Oaths/Notary Public administering the oath, not the applicant, and is likewise optional/only relevant when Section E is used.
7. "Presented for filing by" is modelled as the mandatory closing block (presenterName/presenterAddress/presenterPhoneNo/presenterDate required: true; presenterEmail/presenterAccreditationNo optional, the latter explicitly marked "(Where Applicable)" by the source) — someone must present the completed application to CAC regardless of whether Section E's legal-practitioner declaration is used, consistent with Note (j) naming either a first director/subscriber or an accredited professional as the presenter.
8. documents[] — 6 entries sourced from page 4's Notes (a)/(e)/(h)/(i) above (2 unconditionally required: true — the per-person ID copy and the memorandum/articles of association, both flatly stated by the Notes with no qualifying condition; 4 conditional documents left required: false with the triggering condition disclosed via handling prose rather than a fabricated requiredWhen, since this schema's per-slot director fields carry no boolean flag for "is a minor"/"is a corporate body"/"is foreign with a Nigerian address" to gate on — the same documented convention this registry used for ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company's officerKraPinCertificateCopy), plus 2 attestation-category entries: the director's verbatim consent statement (printed identically under all 4 director slots, required: true) and the deponent's verbatim statutory-declaration oath (required: false, in step with Section E's own optionality).
9. Email-pattern validation (^[^@\s]+@[^@\s]+\.[^@\s]+$) applied to every email field, matching this registry's standard convention (ke/brs, se/skatteverket, et al.), not a pattern printed on the form itself.

Test run

No live submission was attempted — CAC's Form 1.1 is a structural-reference specimen; the live transaction is now conducted through CAC's own login-gated iCRP portal, not a self-service API GovSchema can exercise (see Source 4). Verification here is against the schema's own structural rules (tools/validate.mjs, tools/validate-ajv.mjs) plus a hand-rolled, from-scratch conformance-fixture checker (implementing the Condition grammar — equals/notEquals/in/greaterThan family/all/any/not — directly from spec/v0.3/SPEC.md §8.1, not reused from any other schema's checker) that explicitly exercises both fields[] requiredness/validation and documents[] requiredness and exclusivityGroups — the first two are a known blind spot past conformance passes in this registry have skipped; the exclusivity check was added specifically because this schema is one of the few in this registry to actually use exclusivityGroups.

Fixtures under conformance/ng/cac/cac-1-1-application-for-registration-of-company/1.0.0/:

| Fixture | Scenario | Expected | Actual | |---|---|---|---| | private-company-limited-by-shares-single-director.json | Valid: company limited by shares, single director, share-capital block filled, no secretary/Section E | 0 errors | 0 errors | | company-limited-by-guarantee-two-directors-and-secretary.json | Valid: company limited by guarantee (no share-capital block), two directors, individual secretary, Section E legal-practitioner declaration filled | 0 errors | 0 errors | | mutation-control-missing-required-field.json | Drops companyName from the first valid fixture | 1 error (MISSING_REQUIRED: companyName) | 1 error | | mutation-control-email-pattern-violation.json | Sets companyEmailAddress to "not-an-email-address" | 1 error (PATTERN_VIOLATION) | 1 error | | mutation-control-enum-violation.json | Sets director1IdType to "Something Invalid" (not in the dropdown's own printed option list) | 1 error (ENUM_VIOLATION) | 1 error | | mutation-control-missing-required-document.json | Removes the memorandumAndArticlesOfAssociation entry from documents[] | 1 error (MISSING_REQUIRED_DOCUMENT) | 1 error | | mutation-control-exclusivity-violation.json | Sets both typeOfCompanyLimitedByShares and typeOfCompanyLimitedByGuarantee to true | 1 error (EXCLUSIVITY_VIOLATION) | 1 error |

All 7 fixtures matched their expectation exactly. Both registry validators pass with 0 errors:

``` $ node tools/validate.mjs 380/380 document(s) passed. 3/3 mapping.json companion(s) passed.

$ node tools/validate-ajv.mjs 380/380 document(s) validated against the meta-schema (ajv 2020-12). 3/3 mapping.json companion(s) validated. ```

(Both counts include this schema; the ajv run initially failed with 379/380 until a first-draft validation.min/.min keyword typo on the three share-capital numeric fields was corrected to the meta-schema's actual minimum keyword — caught by validate-ajv.mjs itself, not silently missed.)

tools/govschema-client's registry-index.json was regenerated (npm run build-index, after npm ci --include=dev to ensure ajv is actually installed — this registry's own documented gotcha about a local NODE_ENV=production making a bare npm ci skip dev dependencies) and now includes this document.

What was NOT fully resolved (disclosed, not silently guessed)

• CAC's own domain (cac.gov.ng) could not be fetched directly from this sandbox (HTTP 403 on every attempt) — the chosen source is a mirror on a different, but still genuine, Nigerian federal government domain (fmiti.gov.ng), consistent with the prior scouting pass's finding.
• Note (k)'s "asterisked fields are mandatory" instruction does not correspond to any asterisk actually present in this specimen's extracted text — this schema's requiredness calls are made independently or the form's own internal structure and CAMA 2020's minimum-viable-company rules, not from that unusable convention.
• The "at least one of the 3 Type-of-Company checkboxes must be selected" business rule, and the "Sections D/D1 are mutually exclusive alternatives" and "at least one document among Section D/D1/none may apply" business rules, are disclosed in prose only — GovSchema v0.3 has no "require-at-least-one" primitive across independent optional fields/sections, the same documented gap this registry noted for se/skatteverket's dual contact-address blocks.
• The 4 conditional documents[] entries (minor's birth certificate, corporate-subscriber board resolution, foreign-corporate-subscriber certificate of registration, foreign-director/subscriber residence permit) have no clean boolean field in this schema to gate a requiredWhen on, since this schema's director/secretary slots do not capture subscriber-minority, corporate-subscriber, or foreign-Nigerian-address status as distinct fields — disclosed via each document's own handling prose rather than fabricated.