Māori Land Ownership Register and Distributions

We have been encouraging owners to bring their enquiries to us for the last three years but as we didn’t control the Share Register this was not always effective. “Having regular contact with the Iwi is important to our office, as it keeps us grounded and to that end we investigated moving the Share Register from GHA, Accountants and running this ourselves.”

Following an investigation into options and also to continue to drive reduced costs, we have found a very robust Computer system, named GD Pro which will enable us to maintain the register and update successions and other transactions. Audit reports are able to be generated to ensure that every entry is traceable. This will mean considerable savings for us as, with our ever growing ownership list, comes greater administration costs and much of this has been alleviated by using our existing staff to do this.

We were fortunate that through our Committee of Management member Kiriwaitingi Rei, we were able to see this program demonstrated at the Maori Investment Ltd office who have the same program, they are using it to help them trace owners, create effective methods to deal shareholders who have very small shares and make their AGMs more efficient.

Whilst it will take time to reach that level of detail in the short-term we should be able to deal with a number of anomalies in the Share Register such as, deceased owners, incorrect spelling, owners with multiple names and tracing unclaimed money to reduce this.