Voting 17-0 and with no abstention, the Senate passed on third and final reading a bill seeking to reduce the requirements and streamline the processes in starting and operating businesses to create a more conducive business environment in the country.
Senate Bill No. 1311, or the “Expanded Anti-Red Tape Act of 2017,” sponsored by Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri, chairman of the Senate Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship and co-sponsored by Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto, seeks to amend the existing Anti-Red Tape Act of 2007 (Republic Act 9485).
The bill was also co-authored by Senator Panfilo Lacson and Senator Joel Villanueva, both principal authors of the old law.
Zubiri said the landmark legislation is the Senate’s answer to the clamor of the business sector and government agencies to ease doing business in the country and make the country competitive and compliant with sound global business practices and standards.
He said the proposed measure was meant to reduce “red tape,” or “promote transparency in government with regard to business registrations and other manner of transacting with the public.
In approving the bill, “the Senate immediately responded to the call of President Duterte during his last State of the Nation Address [SONA]—to cut red tape in government,” Zubiri added.
The bill sets a new prescribed processing period under which both national and local government offices will have to “process the application and communicate the decision regarding the approval, or if the application has been disapproved, along with comments or reasons for such disapproval.”
The processing period will not be longer than three working days for simple transactions and seven working days for complex transactions from the time the application was received.
For highly technical applications or such cases where extraordinary due diligence in reviewing the qualifications and merits of an application for clearances, accreditation and/or licenses issued by government agencies, the bill prescribed a processing time no longer than 20 working days.
For the Fire Safety Inspection Certificate, issuance shall in no case be longer than 10 working days.
Zubiri said the bill states that if the concerned national or local government agency fail to act on the application for license, clearance or permit after the prescribed processing period had lapsed then the application “shall be deemed approved.”
However, this is provided that the application has lapsed “without informing the applicant of the error, omissions and/or additional documents required for submission,” and that the applicant has complied with all required documents and fees.
To further prevent inaction and corruption in government agencies, Zubiri said they made the penalties stiffer for violators of the law.”
The following are the violations: refusal to accept application; failure to act on the application; failure to attend to clients who are within the premises of the agency prior to end of official working hours; failure to render frontline services; failure to give the client a written notice on the disapproval of an application; and imposition of irrelevant requirements other than those listed in the Citizen’s Charter of the agency.
Also, he said that the bill mandates the Department of Information and Communications Technology to establish a cloud-native Central Business Portal or other similar technology, to act as a central system that would receive the application and capture application data from business entities nationwide.
The Central Business Portal would allow government agencies like the Department of Trade and Industry, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other national and local government agencies “to receive and process applications, as well as to issue digitally signed business license documents to applicants.”
The bill also called for renaming the existing Competitiveness Bureau under the DTI as the Business Anti-Red Tape and Competitiveness Bureau, which is tasked to complement the functions of the Civil Service Commission in implementing the Expanded ARTA.
Zubiri said the reforms under the bill were necessary if the country was to catch up with its neighbors in terms of business competitiveness.
He cited a 2017 World Bank report which ranked the Philippines 99th among 190 countries on ease-of-doing-business.
In the Association of South East Asian Nations, the Philippines ranked 6th among 10 nations.
