The Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority

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ACRA was formed on 1 April 2004 by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority Act 2004 through the merger of the Registry of Companies and Businesses and the Public Accountants Board. It administers the Companies Act 1967, the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2005, the Business Names Registration Act 2014 and, together with MAS, the Variable Capital Companies Act 2018, under which ACRA registers variable capital companies while MAS regulates their managers.¹ Its online register, BizFile, is the equivalent of the Swiss commercial register and is searchable by anyone for a small fee. Every Singapore company has a unique entity number, which appears on all its filings and which a counterparty should ask for.

Three features of the ACRA regime matter for digital assets. First, every Singapore company must have at least one director ordinarily resident in Singapore, which forces a foreign founder either to relocate, to appoint a trusted local director or to use a nominee director from a corporate service provider.² Second, since 2017 every company must keep a register of registrable controllers, the Singapore term for beneficial owners. Since 2020 that register has been lodged centrally with ACRA, where it is available to law enforcement and to MAS. Nominee directors and nominee shareholders must since 2024 be identified as such in the public register.³ Third, the Corporate Service Providers Act 2024, in force since June 2025, requires every provider of incorporation, nominee director and registered office services to be registered with ACRA and to apply anti-money-laundering controls. The requirement has raised the cost and lowered the availability of nominee directors for crypto companies.⁴

Example: A Zug protocol foundation wants a Singapore company to employ its Asian developers. The company is incorporated through a registered corporate service provider in two days. It needs a Singapore-resident director from the first day, so the foundation council decides between a local employee, a professional independent director and a nominee from the service provider. It must disclose the foundation as its registrable controller. Since a Swiss foundation has no owners, the disclosure names the foundation itself and, under ACRA's guidance, the individuals who control it, which in practice means the council members. The service provider will ask for the foundation's deed, its supervisory authority's confirmation and the council members' identity documents, because the Corporate Service Providers Act 2024 requires it to. None of this involves MAS, because employing developers is not a regulated activity. The company's first MAS contact comes only if it begins to deal in, hold or transfer tokens for others.

Notes

1. Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority Act 2004 (2020 Rev Ed), s. 3 (establishment) and s. 6 (functions); Variable Capital Companies Act 2018, Part 2 (registration by the Registrar of Variable Capital Companies, an ACRA officer) and s. 46 (requirement that the manager be a permissible fund manager regulated by MAS). ↩
2. Companies Act 1967 (2020 Rev Ed), s. 145(1) (at least one director ordinarily resident in Singapore). ↩
3. Companies Act 1967, Part 11A (register of registrable controllers, introduced by the Companies (Amendment) Act 2017 and centralised with ACRA from 2020); Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2024 (public disclosure of nominee status of directors and shareholders). ↩
4. Corporate Service Providers Act 2024, passed on 2 July 2024 and in operation from 9 June 2025; see also the Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act 2024 passed on the same day. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.