287 firms enrolled in portal for business-related permits –ARTA

The Anti-Red Tape Authority (ARTA) said on Tuesday that, as of October, at least 287 corporations were registered in its Central Business Portal (CBP) which acts as the “central gateway” for all business-related permits.

In a virtual presser, ARTA Director-General Secretary Jeremiah Belgica said that, as part of its localized ease of doing business (EODB) effort, the CBP helps in mapping out all the permits and licenses from the national to local government agencies.

“As of now, there are more local government units (LGUs) that we are anticipating to join the Central Business Portal by January next year until the end of this administration,” he said.

The first phase of the CBP was launched on January 28. It tied together six primary agencies, one secondary agency, 17 integrated local government units (LGUs), and 267 hyperlinked LGUs.

Belgica said that ARTA is doing this in phases by taking into consideration the life cycle of a business—from registration, securing credit, actual operation, ensuring that investors are protected, to its folding up or closing if that should be the case.

“Lahat po ‘yan, madaming dinadaanan na mga permits at licenses (all of these undergo plenty of permits and licenses). What we are doing now here is we’re mapping out all of the permits and licenses from womb to tomb,” he said.

OneSEC

Aside from the CBP, Belgica also enumerated several projects to help kickstart a business under its Doing Business Reform 2022.

One of these is the OneSEC program project with the Securities and Exchange Commission which they launched in October. OneSEC facilitates a one-day submission and e-registration of domestic stock corporations.

OneSEC enables the fully automated processing of the company’s verification on its proposed corporate name until the issuance of its Digital Certificate of Incorporation.

“‘Yung ating pangarap na isang araw lamang ang registration (our dream to attain the one-day registration) across the national government up to the local government is actually fast approaching,” said Belgica .

ARTA was urged by the Senate on October 11 to follow the World Bank’s (WB) indicators on its currently-halted EODB survey to improve government services in the Philippines. It seeks to improve the EODB in the country beyond the indicators set by WB as its scope was “limited.”

“To really measure the improvements and the achievements kung tayo ba ay nagi-improve (if we are improving) in the first place o tayo ba ay nagde-decelerate (or decelerating), it really has to be a localized study, it has to be a localized EODB scoring or even ranking,” Belgica said.

He added that this localized EODB project paved the way for the creation of a Technical Working Group which will be led by ARTA Undersecretary for Operations Ernesto Perez.

In the WB 2020 Doing Business Report, the Philippines ranked 95th out of 190 countries. This is a 29-notch improvement from the country’s 124th ranking during the 2019 WB survey.

The country also scored 62.8 points in the report, an increase from the 57.68 points from the previous year. This, according to Belgica, is the “highest score the Philippines ever garnered” in the EODB report.

Despite its discontinuance due to record tampering and submission issues, Belgica said they were still able to submit a total of 102 reforms and 23 data corrections to the World Bank. — DVM, GMA News