MCA Open House Session on Voluntary Strike-Off of Companies and LLPs — August 20, 2026

If you have ever filed Form STK-2 or LLP Form 24 only to watch it bounce back with a resubmission query over a stamp-paper denomination or a statement of accounts that was three days too old, MCA has heard you. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs is holding an Open House Session on Voluntary Strike-Off of Companies and LLPs on Thursday, August 20, 2026, and this time the agenda is built almost entirely around the filing pain points practitioners raise most often — not a policy announcement, but a working session meant to close the gap between what the law requires and what keeps tripping applications up on the MCA21 V3 portal.

Voluntary strike-off has become one of the busiest corners of MCA21 in the last two years. The Centre for Processing Accelerated Corporate Exit (C-PACE) now processes both company and LLP closures centrally, filing volumes have climbed as founders wind down defunct entities rather than let penalties accumulate, and 2026 saw an additional spike after the Companies Compliance Facilitation Scheme (CCFS 2026) opened a discounted strike-off route. That window was due to close July 15, 2026, but MCA extended it to August 31, 2026 via General Circular No. 03/2026 — so it is still open as this session takes place. With more applications moving through the system, the same handful of documentation and certification errors keep resurfacing.

The session is chaired by Shri Ansuman Pattnaik, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, and stakeholders were invited to submit questions in advance through a Google Sheet, with submissions closing August 19, 2026 — one day ahead of the live webinar. Whether or not you submitted a query, the four areas MCA has flagged for discussion map closely onto the recurring failure points in strike-off filings, and this article walks through each of them with the underlying legal and procedural context.

What Exactly Is the August 20 Open House Session?

This is a live, guided webinar format rather than a written circular — MCA is directly addressing questions from practitioners rather than issuing a new rule. It is open to anyone dealing with company or LLP closures: company secretaries, chartered accountants, cost accountants in practice, in-house compliance officers, directors, and designated partners.

Why Do STK-2 and LLP Form 24 Applications Keep Getting Sent Back?

This is the first and, in practitioner surveys and forums, usually the most-asked item on the agenda. Both forms go through C-PACE's scrutiny before the strike-off is approved, and a resubmission query means the clock resets — you fix the flagged issue and refile, often losing weeks in the process. A rejection is worse: in some cases the filing fee itself is not recoverable and the application has to start over.

Common triggers for Form STK-2 (companies)

• Any SRN (Service Request Number) for the company sitting in "pending payment" or "resubmission" status blocks a fresh STK-2 filing until it is cleared.
• Affidavits and indemnity bonds executed on the wrong stamp-paper denomination, or on plain paper instead of judicial/e-stamp paper.
• A single combined affidavit or bond covering all directors, where the form requires each director to file a separate document.
• Registered office address proof that has expired or does not match MCA's master data for the company.
• Bank accounts that have not actually been closed, or liabilities that remain unsettled at the time of filing.
• Numbers in the statement of accounts (STK-8) not tallying with figures declared elsewhere in the form or with the company's last filed financials.

Common triggers for LLP Form 24

• A statement of accounts that is undated, or dated more than 30 days before the filing — this results in outright rejection, not just a query.
• Overdue Form 8 (Statement of Account and Solvency) or Form 11 (Annual Return) filings — these must be cleared first. Since the LLP (Amendment) Rules, 2022, late fees on Form 8 and Form 11 are no longer a flat ₹100/day; they follow a multiplier of the normal filing fee based on how long the delay has run and whether the LLP qualifies as a "Small LLP," with an uncapped per-day component only kicking in past 360 days of delay.
• Open or unsatisfied charges registered against the LLP that have not been formally released.
• Supplementary LLP Agreement deeds (recording partner changes or capital changes) that were never stamped or not signed by all current partners.
• Outstanding loans or creditor dues that make the "nil liabilities" declaration inaccurate.

What Must You Complete Before Applying for Voluntary Strike-Off?

MCA's second agenda item covers eligibility and pre-filing housekeeping — the conditions that have to be true about the company or LLP before STK-2 or Form 24 is even filed, not the paperwork that goes with it.

How Should Documents Filed With STK-2 and Form 24 Be Authenticated?

The third agenda item is narrower but exactly the kind of detail that trips up otherwise complete filings: certification format. Both forms require every attachment to be executed and certified in a specific way, and MCA's own instruction kits are explicit that deviations lead to queries.

Document packs at a glance

Stamp-paper value is the single most literal certification detail practitioners get wrong, and it is a clean example of the kind of "small number, big consequence" error MCA is likely to address directly:

What Other Practical Strike-Off Issues Is MCA Likely to Address?

The fourth agenda item is deliberately open-ended — "other practical issues" — which is where open house sessions tend to be most useful, since it is where MCA fields questions that do not fit neatly into a form-filling checklist. Based on the questions that recur across professional forums and filing guidance for 2026, this bucket is likely to include:

• What happens to a strike-off application if a demand or notice is received from another authority (Income Tax, GST, EPFO) after filing but before approval.
• How director disqualification under Section 164(2) interacts with a pending strike-off application for a group of companies.
• Whether GST registration must be formally cancelled before or can run in parallel with the STK-2 / Form 24 process.
• What restoration looks like if a company or LLP is struck off in error or a creditor surfaces afterward.
• Realistic C-PACE processing timelines given current filing volumes.

How to Join the Session — and Prepare Your Own Filing

Separately from the session logistics, if you are actually preparing a strike-off filing in the near term, the underlying law gives you a fairly concrete checklist to work through before STK-2 or Form 24 is submitted:

Frequently Asked Questions

CorpLawUpdates Analysis

The most significant thing about this session is not any single agenda item — it is the format. MCA is increasingly using open house webinars to resolve friction around specific e-forms rather than waiting for enough complaints to accumulate into a formal clarificatory circular. For voluntary strike-off specifically, that is a sensible move: the process itself hasn't changed dramatically since C-PACE centralisation, but the volume moving through it has, and volume tends to expose exactly the kind of documentation edge cases this session is built around.

The likely compliance challenge is less about the law itself and more about coordination. A clean STK-2 or Form 24 filing depends on a CS, a CA, and the company's directors or the LLP's partners all being aligned on timing — the statement of accounts has a 30-day shelf life, stamp papers have to be the right denomination before anyone signs, and every overdue statutory filing has to be cleared first. Any one party moving slower than the others is enough to force a restart. Practitioners attending this session should treat it less as a Q&A and more as a chance to get MCA's read on exactly which of these coordination failures cause the most rework, so that internal checklists can be built around the actual friction points rather than the theoretical ones.

What should practitioners watch for going forward? First, whether MCA follows this session with a written FAQ or advisory codifying the answers given — that would turn today's live clarifications into something citable. Second, whether C-PACE processing timelines shift materially given the post-CCFS 2026 volume increase; average processing time had come down to the 70–90 day range for companies in earlier reporting periods, and a sustained spike in filings is worth monitoring against that benchmark. (A more recent MCA update reported average processing time down to under two months as of July 2025, so the 70–90 day figure may already understate current performance — worth confirming against MCA's latest disclosure rather than treating either number as fixed.) Third, expect this open-house format to show up again for other high-friction e-forms on MCA21 V3 — keep an eye on MCA's official channels if portal-level issues beyond strike-off are a recurring pain point for your practice.

None of this changes what the law requires. Sections 248–252 of the Companies Act, 2013 and Section 75 of the LLP Act, 2008 remain exactly as they were before this session was announced. What changes, if the session delivers on its stated agenda, is how much guesswork is left in getting a filing accepted on the first attempt.