With the six-month rehabilitation of Boracay, we can expect a drop in tourist arrivals during these summer months.
The drop will be a challenge to the Duterte administration, particularly to the Tourism Department. Now they have to tap other destinations to fill the gap.
Teo should concentrate on this challenge instead of making ad placements at her brothers’ media company and taking clerks, drivers and utility workers with her in her many trips abroad.
Is Teo still up to the task?
***
The Securities and Exchange Commission reacted to my column on the supposed shenanigans there. Some businessmen had complained to me about the agency’s failure to process their registration papers so they could do business at once.
I believe in presenting both sides of an issue, so I reprint here the SEC’s letter in the interest of fairness.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission takes exception to your column item appearing in The Manila Standard. The title, ‘Shenanigans at the SEC,’ imputes anomalous acts and questionable practices to the SEC, running counter to the SEC consistently being rated number one in the fight against corruption per surveys conducted in 2015 and 2016 by the Social Weather Stations with support from the Australian Embassy —The Asia Foundation Partnership in the Philippines, and the United States Agency for International Development, in partnership with the National Competitiveness Council.
While the article expressed frustration over the perceived delays of the new process involved in company registration, it did not point out any particular “shenanigan,” trickery, or any other anomalous act employed by the SEC in choosing and implementing an online company registration system. Surely, full automation and online processing of registration of corporations cannot be considered a “shenanigan.”
In launching the Company Registration System in late November 2017, the SEC was heeding the call of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to streamline government processes. The CRS was intended to make registration easier by making it available 24 hours day, seven days a week. The CRS was envisioned to make the registration process much simpler as it would only entail a registrant to access the CRS website and fill out the CRS application form. The registrant need only visit the SEC to claim the Certificate of Registration and submit the original notarized documents.
Verily, applications for registration of new corporations and partnerships have been successfully processed through the online CRS.
Moreover, through the CRS, the possibility of corruption is eradicated due to the cessation of face-to-face transactions and manual intervention.
Unfortunately, as in all transitions, more so from manual to an electronic system such as the CRS, initial struggles are inevitable.
Be that as it may, the SEC is not unmindful of the unintended delays experienced by registrants using the CRS. Upon investigation into the matter, however, it was discovered that the delays experienced during the first few months of implementation of the CRS had been caused by system slowdown during peak hours and registrants’ non-familiarity and misuse.
From its rollout, the SEC saw the need to enhance the CRS to accommodate an ever-increasing number of applications. The SEC is working round the clock literally with a new work-shifting scheme for CRS processors and implementing a stop-gap server infrastructure as a soft solution, while a more concrete systems upgrade is being laid out.
As of 19 April 20118, 14,200 (76.43 percent) of the total 18,578 applications in CRS have been pre-processed while 4,378 (23.57 percent) are pending final processing. The total number of completed registration from launching date of the CRS on 21 November 2017 to 19 April 2018 is 5,607.
The SEC cannot revert to an outdated system of paperwork, antiquated forms, and face-to-face transactions anymore. Instead it has chosen a more efficient way of serving the public trough the CRS free of any shenanigan.”
***
You can never please everybody all the time.
This is precisely what happened to the executive order signed by the President which in effect put an end to “contractualization” or the practice of hiring workers for only five months so they cannot be eligible to benefits due regular workers.
The problem is that under the Labor Code, employers have the right to hire and dismiss workers and employees. As a result, there is a need to amend the Labor Code, which is outdated anyway.
The President was right when he said it is up to Congress to do the rest.
Contractualization exists even in government!
The problem now is how foreign investors will look at the end of contractualization. The cost of labor has a great impact on how business is run.
If the cost of labor becomes prohibitive, foreign investors will go to other places.
***
Some people think President Duterte should apologize to the government of Kuwait after the “covert” rescue operations that went viral. This prompted the Kuwaiti government to expel our Philippine ambassador and order the arrest of the embassy staff involved in the operation.
Both Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano and Ambassador Renato Villa have already apologized while saying that a country is allowed to protect its nationals abroad.
For President Duterte to make another apology is too much.