Australia's Personal Property Securities Register remains controversial 12 months after it was launched. Designed to create a single national register of property with security interests, the system was plagued by technical problems in its early days, but now the main concern is that awareness among the general business community is low.Lawyers agree that the most significant issue is retention. A company may sell goods on the basis that title does not pass to the buyer until payment is completed. Under the old law the vendor retained title until payment was completed, but under the Personal Property Securities Act the vendor must register its security interest with the PPSR.Under PPSA, if the security interest is not registered and the buyer becomes insolvent the vendor would not have title, and the goods would pass into the hands of the receiver or liquidator.A banking and finance partner at law firm Hall & Wilcox, Mark Inston, said: "The level of awareness around the PPSA and the PPS Register is still quite low among some sectors of Australian industry."While all banks and most large companies have generally dealt with this, we are encountering some companies that have not been as diligent."Inston said his firm had acted in a number of matters where companies had been caught out by the retention rules."In one case, a company is potentially a few million dollars out of pocket after another company, which it sold goods to, went into administration," Inston said.A partner at Gadens Lawyers, Paul Armstrong, said another problem area was companies not properly registering their security interest. Armstrong said some descriptions were so broad that they were ineffectual.He said another consequence of the general lack of awareness of the PPSA was that companies did not realise the deadline for registering a security interest had been reduced from 48 to 20 days.A senior associate at Gadens, Anthony Walsh, said there were still some legacy issues from the technical problems that plagued PPSR at its launch. About 6000 registrations had failed to migrate from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to the PPSRWalsh said: "A spreadsheet with these registrations is still available on the ASIC website. Affected secured parties will need to take action to register these interests before January 30, 2014, to ensure that they are afforded the same priority they enjoyed on the ASIC register."Armstrong said there was some lobbying going on for an improvement to the PPSA regime. "There is some lobbying. One administrative bugbear is that you can't do multiple registrations; you have to register things twice if they fall into different collateral classes."More than 20 state and territory registers have migrated their records to the PPSR. They include the Australian Securities and Investments Commission's Register of Company Charges, state registers of encumbered vehicles, state bill of sale registers, and state crop and livestock mortgage registers. The Fisheries Register and the Australian Register of Ships have also moved.The latest figures on the operation of the PPSR show that there were 1.5 million searches in the