Does a PT PMA need a company secretary?

Most foreign owners of Indonesian companies have an accountant handling tax filings and nobody handling company law. Those are different obligations with different consequences.

What corporate secretarial work covers

The annual shareholder meeting (RUPS), approving the accounts and dealing with matters requiring shareholder approval, minuted properly. This is a company law requirement, and single-shareholder companies forget it almost universally because holding a meeting with yourself feels absurd.

Shareholder resolutions for anything that changes the company: amending the articles, changing capital or shares, appointing or removing directors and commissioners, approving a dividend, or selling or encumbering substantial assets — which for a property-holding company includes the property.

Maintaining the statutory registers — shareholders, directors, commissioners.

Keeping the OSS record accurate. Any change to activity, address, shareholder or director must be reflected. A company whose OSS record does not match reality has a problem waiting.

LKPM, the quarterly investment activity report required of PMA companies, which is separate from tax and genuinely enforced.

Ministry notifications where required, and licence renewals.

Document custody — the deed of establishment, ministerial approvals, resolutions, licences — kept somewhere retrievable.

Why it is invisible until it is not

None of this produces a deadline letter in the way a tax filing does. Nothing goes wrong on the day it is missed.

Then it surfaces:

Selling the company. A buyer's lawyer reads the corporate record. Missing resolutions, unauthorised appointments and unapproved accounts are findings, and findings become discounts or a dead transaction.

If your exit is selling the PT PMA with the property inside it — frequently the cleaner route — the corporate record is part of what you are selling.

Distributing profit. A dividend requires the accounts to support it and a resolution authorising it. A director transferring company funds to a personal account abroad is not a distribution, and it creates problems at audit, at a tax review and at sale.

Changing anything. Appointing a director, changing the address, amending the activity. All require resolutions, and a company whose record does not support the current position has a gap to fix first.

Licence renewals and bank matters, where the resolutions evidencing who is authorised are requested.

An immigration renewal, where the sponsoring company's standing matters. An investor or work KITAS rests on the company, and a company with missed LKPM filings or an inactive NIB has a problem that attaches to the permits it sponsors.

Who does it

A corporate service provider, which is what most PT PMAs use, frequently the same firm handling accounting — but not automatically.

Ask directly whether corporate secretarial work is in scope. Many accountants handle the filings they were asked to handle. "We handle your company" does not necessarily include the RUPS, the registers or the OSS updates.

Get the scope in writing: bookkeeping, monthly filings, LKPM, the annual return, financial statements, audit coordination, the annual meeting and resolutions, OSS record maintenance, and responding to correspondence from authorities. That last one is commonly excluded and commonly needed.

What it costs

Modest as a line item, and it sits within the overall annual company cost of USD 2,000 to USD 5,000 for a small low-activity PT PMA, rising to USD 6,000 to USD 15,000 or more with staff, VAT registration, volume and an audit requirement.

Reconstructing a corporate record years later under a buyer's deadline costs considerably more, and sometimes it cannot be done.

What to do now

Ask whether it is in scope, and get the answer in writing.

Diarise the annual meeting, after the financial statements are prepared.

Check the OSS record matches reality — activity, address, shareholders, directors.

Confirm LKPM filings are current, particularly if anyone's immigration position rests on the company.

Confirm the NITKU position, the business unit identifier issued per registered place of business, which companies registered before the Coretax change frequently lack.

Fix gaps now rather than at sale. This is the cheapest possible moment.