E-Regulations offer a renewed business environment

The Vietnam e-regulations portal was launched on June 29, but preparations must have begun a long time before that. How did it all begin?

The first e-regulations portal went online in 2006 and Colombia was the first country that implemented the project. In 2007 somebody from the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment saw it in a meeting and said, “We would like to bring this to Vietnam.” And so there was a request from the Foreign Investment Agency under the ministry to the Government of Luxembourg and UNCTAD to have a system that can show in a user-friendly way the procedures to do business. Since then we have been progressively gathering information on the procedures in seven provinces and setting up the national portal.

During the process of gathering information from all these government agencies to set up the websites have you met any difficulties?

It’s difficult to gather the information only because the administrative procedures are complex.

The authorities were very open. They sent letters to the administrations of all the provinces to tell them that there were people coming in to collect information. But we have to visit many government agencies on many different occasions to collect the information. Sometimes we ask the same questions several times to clearly understand the procedures. Sometimes the civil servants thought they were not entitled to give out the information. They told us they didn’t know if it was public information or not. This happens not only in Vietnam but in other countries too. The project therefore brings to the civil servants the message that public procedures have to be public. And this message of transparency is mind transformational.

And you found out that in Vietnam there are more than ten steps on average that an investor has to take in order to perform a procedure such as creating a company or amend an investment certificate. Will e-regulations change this?

There have been many meetings on simplifications in Vietnam, but without information it’s difficult to simplify.

The Vietnam eRegulations portal gives information to the users and the government, and shows procedures as they are practiced in reality. Nobody so far had the full vision of these procedures. Now you can see the difference between the law and the practice, and you realise that the law doesn’t require all these steps so you can re-engineer and streamline the process in order to make it simple and efficient. It’s like when you want to reorganise a room you have to turn the light on and see what’s inside. Then you can reorganise and throw out the things that are unnecessary.

To answer your question there is no way to be sure that eRegulations, or transparency for that matter, is going to lead to the simplification of procedures. But it’s the only way to start.

E-Regulations has been implemented in many other countries. Did it achieve the expected results there?

Yes. First of all there are many people visiting the eRegulations website, about 8,000 per week even for a small country. It’s a good way to inform the public. Many countries have rolled out the second stage, which is simplification. Some countries have gone further to computerise the simplified procedures. You can fill in a form online, upload your documents and pay all fees with a credit card. This is the case in Guatemala, El Salvador, Tanzania and Argentina. Before simplification in these countries, numerous forms were required and about 25 steps involved to create a business, now they have only one form and 2 or 3 steps.

That’s the vision for Vietnam?

That’s the vision for every country including Vietnam.