URSB DIGITAL DREAM TURNS NIGHTMARE! Kainobwisho Team On Spot As Billions Sink Into Glitchy System, Data Leaks & Fraud Risks
What was sold to Ugandans as a sleek, modern gateway to doing business has exploded into a scandalous tale of delays, system breakdowns and dangerous loopholes, with the Auditor General’s December 2025 report exposing deep cracks in the Online Business Registration System (OBRS) at Uganda Registration Services Bureau.
Under the stewardship of Registrar General Mercy K. Kainobwisho, the Bureau pumped a staggering UGX 6.49 billion over three years into designing, developing and maintaining the OBRS, a system launched in December 2022 with promises to revolutionize business registration and service delivery. But instead of efficiency, what has emerged is a troubling pattern of inefficiency, vulnerability and administrative lapses that have left users frustrated and exposed.
The report paints a grim picture of a system struggling to perform even its most basic functions. Services such as company name reservation, business name amendments, business name registration and data updates have been plagued by significant delays, with URSB consistently failing to meet its own approved turnaround times. For entrepreneurs eager to formalize their businesses, the promise of speed has turned into a waiting game riddled with uncertainty.
Behind the scenes, the system itself appears to be constantly buckling under pressure. Frequent and recurring downtime has become the norm rather than the exception, with incident logs revealing multiple outages between August 2023 and September 2025. The causes read like a checklist of avoidable failures: network breakdowns, storage exhaustion, inadequate power backup and even human error. During these outages, users were completely locked out, unable to process critical business registration applications.
With these audit findings, the spotlight turns to the ICT leadership under Arthur Kwesiga and business registration oversight led by Gilbert Agaba, as questions mount over how such a heavily funded system could be left so exposed and unreliable.
Even more alarming is the handling of sensitive personal data. The Auditor General discovered that historical business registration records shared with third parties through the OBRS contained unredacted personal information, including full dates of birth of directors, proprietors and subscribers. In an era of rising cyber threats, such lapses have raised serious concerns about privacy and data protection within the Bureau.
If the data exposure was not enough, the system’s weak safeguards against fraud have sent shockwaves through accountability circles. Controls meant to prevent fraudulent registrations are described as inadequate, with forged signatures and unauthorized filings only being addressed after they are detected or reported. The OBRS, it turns out, cannot authenticate digital signatures or verify whether approvals are actually submitted by legitimate company owners, leaving the door wide open for manipulation.
The Bureau’s credibility takes another hit with delays in achieving internationally recognized quality standards. Despite embarking on the ISO 9001:2015 certification process as far back as August 2018 and committing to complete it by June 30, 2024, URSB had still not secured certification by the end of the 2024/25 financial year, missing its own deadline by a full year.
Customer care, a critical pillar of any digital service, appears to be virtually non-existent within the OBRS framework. The report reveals that URSB does not maintain a register of customer complaints, meaning there is no proper record of complaint types, no tracking of resolution timelines and no mechanism for clients to follow up on their issues. In effect, the Bureau is operating blind, unable to identify recurring problems, measure its performance or even determine whether complaints are being resolved in time.
The Auditor General did not mince words in calling for urgent action, advising the Accounting Officer to tighten system performance by addressing storage, power and network weaknesses, and to introduce redundancy for critical servers to minimize downtime. There is also a push to enforce strict data minimization and redaction controls to protect personal information shared with third parties.
On the fraud front, the Bureau has been urged to benchmark with other government institutions and integrate proper digital signature authentication into the OBRS to seal the glaring loopholes. Equally pressing is the need to fast-track the full implementation of ISO 9001:2015 quality management standards, including establishing a comprehensive and functional customer complaints management system.
As the revelations sink in, what was meant to be a flagship digital innovation is now being viewed as a cautionary tale of how billions can be spent without delivering reliability, security or accountability. With the weight of these findings now public, pressure is mounting on Kainobwisho and her team to urgently fix a system that was supposed to make doing business easier—but has instead become a source of frustration, risk and controversy.
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