Cutting business procedures, conditions: Do not be on the "paper"!

The business community and people want administrative procedures to be simple and easy to implement. Photo: ST.

Great determination

The Resolution No. 01/NQ-CP on tasks and solutions to implement the socio-economic development plan promulgated by the Government in early 2018 has set out the tasks to fundamentally improve, make strong changes in the business environment and competitiveness of the economy; to focus on comprehensive reform of specialized inspection activities, ensuring the reduction and simplification of 50% of the list of goods, products and specialized inspection procedures; cut, simplify 50% business registration.

Implementing the above guidelines, a series of ministries and branches have come up with solutions and plans for implementation. Recently, Minister of Industry and Trade – Mr. Tran Tuan Anh has signed a decision approving the master plan to simplify a series of administrative and business registration procedures of the Ministry in 2018. Accordingly, the Ministry of Industry and Trade is going to simplify and remove 54 procedures. This is the third time the Ministry of Industry and Trade is to cut, simplify administrative and business registration procedures, after the first phase in 2016 with 123 procedures were simplified, abolished, and the second phase in 2017 with the reduction and simplification of 183 procedures.

Together with the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Finance has proposed to abolish 99 business registration procedures, simplify 89 business registrations out of 370 conditions (reached 50.8%).

During this time, Minister of Transport – Mr. Nguyen Van The, signed a decision to announce the reduction and simplification plan of 384/570 business registrations, equivalent to 67.36% of business registration in the transport sector.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment continues to propose to abolish and simplify 99/163 business registrations. Previously, the agency proposed to abolish and simplify 76/163 business registrations in 18 conditional business lines of natural resources and environment sector.

It is from these determination and actions above, the government praised the ministries for announcing the programs and plans to cut and simplify 50% of the list of goods, products and specialized inspection procedures, Business registration in the branch or sector in charge. However, to carry out this work effectively, the Prime Minister requested that the simplification, reduction or abolition of business registration should address the existing shortcomings, problems and achieve the objective of creating a favorable investment environment for people and businesses. In addition, the Prime Minister also requested ministries and branches to urgently issue documents according to their competence, or submit them to the Government for consideration and issuance of decrees on cutting down business registration and specialized examination procedures for early implementation

Need to hurry

From the above-mentioned directions of the Government, ministries and branches, when promulgating the plan for reduction and simplification of business registration, it requires the functional units to quickly draft legal documents to submit to the Prime Minister. For example, the Ministry of Transport requests that these documents be submitted to the Government by October 30, 2018. Moreover, the drafting of documents must be based on the acquisition and consultation of enterprises to ensure the reduction and simplification does not create additional conditions that cause difficulties for enterprises.

Evaluating the above actions of the ministries, experts said that the speed of reform is still slow and does not meet the enterprises’ expectations; The Government has directed the strong eradication of business registration since August 2017, but after more than 10 months there are not many ministries and sectors that have implemented this task seriously.

With the same point, according to Dr. Vu Tien Loc - Chairman of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI),

The reduction of business registration will help to untie the activities of enterprises, especially the small and medium enterprises, which make up a large proportion in the structure of enterprises. However, Mr. Loc expressed concern that there are still some ministries that are not really active in implementing, even moving, changing from one regulation to another, which doesn’t really untie businesses. This is also a concern of many businesses before the phenomenon of cutting a procedure, "grow" another procedure, or "lay" the word to "trap" businesses.

In fact, the implementation of the reduction, simplification of conditions and procedures for businesses are reflected in several Decrees; For example,

The Decree No. 15/2018/ND-CP replaces the Decree No. 38/2012/ ND-CP guiding some articles of the Law on Food Safety. This Decree has helped businesses to self-proclaim food safety certificates, transfer from pre-inspection to post-inspection ... so about 90% of products procedures are reduced, which saves cost for businesses and they also "lighten burden" a lot.

Many business registrations have "complained" many times by enterprises, but they are still not resolved. For example, the Decree No. 19/2016/ND-CP on gas business has made companies "complain" because they cannot meet the unreasonable conditions, but after several times of collecting comments as well as submitting drafts, up to now, the transitional period has expired as prescribed, the new decree has not yet been issued which makes businesses likely to "sit on fire". Therefore, recently, Deputy PM Trinh Dinh Dung asked the Ministry of Industry and Trade to quickly complete the decree draft to submit to the Government for approval.

In addition, many experts said that many procedures, business regulations are general, unclear, lack specifics, are difficult to determine; or some conditions impose rigid business methods, too deep an interference in the autonomy of production and business organizations, causing adverse impact on enterprises ...

Mr. Nguyen Dinh Cung, Director of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), said that according to the CIEM survey, only the Ministry of Transport has changed considerably from the first draft to the final draft of the content and conditions of abolition with real improvements. And some ministries, such as the Ministry of Education and Training, still have two levels of business registration with a very large duplication. In addition, many conditions, regulations also have points a, b, c, each of these points have a few ";", while each point, each sign is added a business registration procedure. Therefore, in my opinion, the number of business registration conditions is much larger than the statistics from many ministries. Therefore, Mr. Cung said that ministries and agencies need to increase their responsibility, monitoring and pressure on individuals and enforcement units to motivate the reform strongly and achieve the target.

It can be seen that the business community is very excited and sympathetic to the policy of cutting business conditions, creating a favorable business environment by the Government, because this is considered as a driving force for economic development. But after the announcement of the reduction to increase business confidence, then, businesses want these statements to come into reality, the authorities quickly issued the clear circular, regulations, modified conditions for enterprises to quickly apply them in production and business activities; To make these statements not only on "paper", through documents, papers or promises made by leaders of ministries.

Therefore, Mr. Vu Tien Loc proposed to strengthen monitoring activities of people and enterprises to strengthen the discipline of the ministries. In addition, many commented that ministries should not only review once, but continue to carry out a higher level review with changes in thoughts, manners and management methods,… to help enterprises operate smoothly and effectively but still ensure the strict management of state agencies.

On May 30, 2018, during the working session of the PM's working group with the representatives from 17 ministries and sectors related to the reform of specialized inspection for export and import goods and simplification, reduction of business registrations, Minister, Chairman of the Office of Government – Mr. Mai Tien Dung has said very harshly about the "3 not" of the ministries, including: not true, not be the spirit of the Government, not be exactly the spirit of the Prime Minister. According to the head of the working group, if this situation happens continuously, it will cause suspicion from enterprises, people, even “drawing” information among ministries, losing confidence in the Government.

Moreover, only 3 ministries implemented the reduction of specialized examination conditions, reaching the target over 50%; some simplification procedures are formal or only mechanically reduced... Therefore, the abolition and reduction of administrative procedures must be handled by decree, not to "dodge" into other documents to create more conditions to "tie" businesses.