The Review of the Personal Property Securities Act has released its interim report, detailing a series of consultation papers it will issue to get more feedback before making final recommendations.The review, which is headed by Ashurst partner Bruce Whittaker, said the majority of submissions argued that the PPSA and the Personal Property Securities Register were too complex. Industry bodies said many businesses were unaware of the Act and its impact."The clear message from the submissions is that if the Act is to achieve its potential, it needs to be clarified and simplified," the interim report said.The PPSA, which came into effect in January 2012, replaced state and territory laws with a national regime for the creation, registration and enforcement of security interests in personal property.The Act also created the PPSR, which consolidated more than 40 commonwealth, state and territory registers used to provide notification to third parties of interest in personal property.The PPSA was designed to simplify the process of creating and enforcing security interests, make the process more consistent, give greater certainty about those matters and reduce costs.It was also intended to increase the range of property available to secure finance.The interim report said: "Financial institutions and large companies were prepared for the Act when it took effect in January 2012 but the same cannot be said for small businesses. "Some business owners first learned of the Act when they discovered that they had lost ownership of their property to an insolvent customer, because they had not perfected [registered or otherwise firmed up a security interest] their interest in their property under the new rules."Submissions called for a number of changes to the law, including narrowing its scope to certain types of assets and excluding certain types of business, such as short-term equipment hiring. There were a large number of detailed recommendations.The interim report has not made any recommendation for changes to the Act, saying that all sides of the debate on individual proposals should be given an opportunity to express their views.The review will issue a series of consultation papers on potential areas for reform and seek further comment before making specific recommendations. The papers will cover transactions to which the PPSA applies, the creation of security interests, modes of perfection, dealing in collateral, priority rules, enforcement of a security interest and the PPSR.It has recommended that government and business develop an education and awareness program targeted at small business.On the positive side, the interim report said the PPSA had significantly improved the consistency of secured transactions law.On other matters it was not so sure. It was anticipated that the PPSA would reduce the cost of finance in a number of ways: financiers would be able to pass efficiency gains on to borrowers; financiers would be able to reduce funding costs because of the elimination of uncertainties about security interests; and borrowers would be able to use a wider range of assets as security "Comments in the submissions and anecdotal evidence suggest that these benefits are yet to