Speakers at the Personal Property Securities Reform conference in Sydney yesterday made no attempt to gloss over the problems users have encountered with the PPS Register in its first two months of operation. Dipen Mitra, the operations manager at Insolvency and Trustee Service Australia's service centre, said the register was on life support for the first couple of days after its launch, on January 30, and then went into intensive care for a couple of weeks. The registrar of Personal Property Securities, David Bergman, outlined a number of projects that needed to be completed before the register could be said to be operating as intended.Bergman said the most serious problems related to files transferred from the Australian Securities and Investment Commission. Of the four issues to be addressed, two will be resolved in the next month and the other two are long term problems.The Personal Property Securities Act was designed to create a single national property register and a single set of rules for gathering information on personal property with security interests. So far, 23 state and territory registers have migrated a total of 4.8 million records to the PPS Register. Users have carried out one million searches since January 30.Bergman said performance of the system was still below expectations. "We have only had to close it down for a short period a couple of weeks ago, but there are lots of times when it has been slow," he said."Transactions are completed but it might take one or two hours. "Some of that performance problem was due to bulk data migrations. That is reducing now. But there are still times of the day when the service is degraded and that baffles us."The first of the problems related to ASIC data and concerns the use of Australian Company Number and Australian Business Number identifiers.Bergman said the PPS Register was built with a hierarchy of identifiers and looks for a company's ACN first. Close to one million ASIC records came with ABNs but not ACNs, however. As a consequence, users have to do a number of searches, which adds to time spent on the system and cost. ASIC has given ITSA a list of corresponding ACNs, and, over the next two weeks, ABNs will be replaced with ACNs on all one million records. The next issue to be dealt with is that a number of security registrations that were discharged were migrated and now appear on the PPS Register. Bergman said: "We know which ones they are and we are going to cleanse them. It will not take long and it will be the job we do after dealing with the ABN/ACN issue."He said there were two problems that would take longer to resolve. There are 27,000 records that identify one security party when, in fact, there are a number of security parties registered (in a syndicated loan, for example). Bergman said it was up to the financial institutions to clean up these records and it would take some time.A more serious