The Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) was hastening the effort of cutting business prerequisites in term of quality to ensure the deregulation to truly benefit firms, Minister Nguyen Chi Dung said.

The Ministry of Planning and Investment said that focus should be placed on simplifying customs checks as well as deregulation of business prerequisites.

Dung said that the ministry in the first quarter of this year proposed prerequisites to be removed for 22 business lines and amended for four others to ensure the consistency with the Law on Fisheries, the Forestry Law and the Press Law.

Evaluation of the quality of the deregulation of business prerequisites which were implemented in 2018 and its impacts on the operation of firms are being carried out and findings are expected to be reported to the Government in June.

Initial findings regarding the quality of deregulation of business prerequisites at four ministries showed that just about 30 per cent of removed prerequisites really created favourable conditions for firms.

Dung urged relevant ministries and agencies to hasten the effort of reviewing business prerequisites for removing unnecessary and infeasible ones and simplifying those which remained complicated and unclear.

The MPI has recently made public the draft amendments to the Law on Investment and the Law on Enterprise which aim at creating favourable, transparent and level business climate, improving quality and efficiency in raising investment resources appropriate to the socio-economic development orientations.

One of the focuses is completing regulations for business lines which required prerequisites while cutting and simplifying those which are unnecessary and unreasonable.

In the draft law, the ministry said that a mechanism would be raised to control the issuance of new business prerequisites or amendments to existing business prerequisites to ensure that the effort truly benefits firms.

The draft law said that prerequisites would be removed for business lines which did not have direct impacts on national defense, social security and safety, social ethics and community health, which are currently being managed by standards and which had their product quality evaluated and decided to choose or not by end-users.

In addition, prerequisites would be removed for the business line of supplying of public products and services which could be selected and control via bidding.

Specifically, for debt collection service, the ministry said that the legal framework managing this service must be completed to ensure social order, adding that careful consideration should be given on whether this service should be regarded as business line with prerequisites for banned business line.

Regarding customs checks for import and export, Dung said that there were still regulations which caused difficulties for firms.

Dung said that the first quarter of this year did not see significant improvement in the simplification of customs checks.

“Customs checks are still causing difficulties for business operation. The slow reform is increasing costs, wasting time and undermining competitiveness of firms,” Dung stressed.

Dung urged the effort in reducing the the number of products which required customs checks as well as simplifying the customs checking procedures. — VNS