Seven Days: The COIDA Changes You Have To Report, and What It Costs When You Do Not

Most employers assume the Compensation Fund needs telling about the big things — a new company, a closure. The Act is considerably stricter than that, and considerably faster. You have seven days, and it applies to any change in what you registered with.

What section 80 actually says

Section 80(1) requires an employer to register with the commissioner and furnish the prescribed particulars of the business. Then, in one short subsection that does most of the work:

An employer shall within seven days of any change in the particulars so furnished notify the commissioner of such change.

Note what it does not say. There is no materiality threshold, no list of qualifying changes, and no distinction between an administrative detail and a fundamental one. Any change in the particulars you furnished starts a seven-day clock.

Section 80(6) then makes failure to comply with section 80 an offence. That is the formal position, and in practice it is not what usually hurts you. What hurts you is much duller.

Why a stale address becomes an estimated assessment

The Fund communicates with the particulars it has. Notices of assessment, requests for outstanding returns and audit queries go to the address and contact details on the record.

When those are three years out of date, the correspondence still goes out and is still treated as delivered. You do not see the request. The return goes unfiled. The Fund does what the Act permits it to do when no return is furnished, and assesses you on an estimate, with a fine on top.

By the time anyone notices, the trigger is usually a Letter of Good Standing that will not issue for a tender. The address change would have taken an afternoon. Our guide to estimated assessments and penalties covers how to unwind it once it has happened.

The changes people actually forget

The contact person left. The bookkeeper who registered the company resigned in 2023 and their email is still the one on file. This is the single most common version, and the most damaging, because nothing looks wrong from your side.

You moved premises. Obvious once stated, routinely missed, because the change gets made at CIPC and with SARS and the Fund is forgotten. Each register is notified separately.

The company was renamed, or converted. A name change or a change of entity type alters the particulars on the record.

What the business does changed. The expensive one, and it gets its own section below.

You started a second business. Section 80(2) requires the particulars to be furnished separately in respect of each business carried on by the employer. A new operation is not folded into the existing registration by default.

Changing the nature of the business is not an admin update

Your assessment is your declared earnings multiplied by a tariff, and that tariff comes from the industry class the Fund assigned you. The class comes from what the business does.

So a construction company that moves into general trading, or an office-based business that starts sending staff onto sites, is not merely updating a description. It is changing the rate at which every future assessment is calculated. The tariff tables show how far apart the classes sit.

This is also the one with its own document requirements — including a commissioned affidavit that may not be commissioned by any employee of the business. The nature of business change guide sets out the full pack and the timelines.

Worth knowing before you delay it: the change takes effect from the date the Fund receives the documents. It is not backdated to when the business actually changed. Every month of delay is a month assessed at the old class.

If you are already late

Almost everyone reading this is past seven days, frequently by years. That is not a reason to leave it — the exposure grows with every assessment cycle raised against stale particulars, and the seven-day breach is not the thing that will cost you money. The missed correspondence is.

Do it in this order. Update the contact details first, because that stops the next notice going into a void. Then deal with anything the old address already caused. Then submit the nature-of-business change if the work has genuinely shifted, since that one takes the longest to process.

Doing it yourself, or not

A straightforward address or contact update on an account you can still access is a self-service job. Do that yourself.

It gets harder when nobody at the company can still log in — the registered email belongs to someone who left, which is precisely the situation the update was meant to prevent. ClearComply does not act for the Compensation Fund and cannot change your record itself. A registered labour practitioner handles the submission: an email, contact or address change is R1 700, and a change in the nature of the business is R7 200, which reflects the affidavit, the document pack and the follow-up the Fund requires for a reclassification.

Questions we get asked

Is seven days working days or calendar days? The subsection says “seven days” without qualifying it. Treat it as tight either way — the practical answer is to file the change in the same week it happens.

I updated CIPC. Does the Fund get told? No. They are separate registers and neither notifies the other. This catches people on address changes, name changes and closures alike.

Will reporting a change trigger an audit? A reclassification does put your account in front of someone, and if there are outstanding returns behind it they may surface. That is an argument for getting the returns in order, not for leaving the particulars wrong — a wrong class discovered by the Fund is a considerably worse position than one you corrected.

ClearComply is a private commercial software provider and is not affiliated with, authorized by, or an official agency of CIPC or any government entity. We are not the Compensation Fund or the Department of Employment and Labour. Letters of Good Standing are issued by the Compensation Fund, not by us.