Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has ordered ministries and local governments to sanction agencies and officials that have illegally issued business conditions beyond their authority.

The move is aimed to improve the country’s business environment, which, according to experts, has turned less attractive to foreign investors than other regional countries due to time-consuming procedures, poor service quality and corruption.

Reports on the violators and punitive measures against them should be submitted to the Prime Minister this quarter, according to the national competitiveness forum belonging to the Government’s portal.

PM Dung has told ministries and local authorities to stop regulating conditional business sectors and setting business conditions.

Last January, the Ministry of Justice announced a report on the conditional business fields and business conditions set by other ministries and local authorities after it had thoroughly checked 249 legal documents issued by 16 ministries and 276 documents by 52 cities and provinces.

The report showed nine of the ministerial documents and 20 of the local ones were against the prevailing regulations and laws. These violations are related to requirements for car, motorcycle and bicycle repairs; electrical four-wheeled cars used to transport tourists, and cargo transport by motorcycles and rudimentary vehicles.

However, Nguyen Dinh Cung, president of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), told the final day of the Spring Economic Forum 2015 in Nghe An Province on Wednesday that the country’s business climate has been bogged down by over 5,580 business conditions illegally set by authorities of different levels.

Cung said many of the business conditions should be abolished when the revised investment and enterprise laws take effect from July 1 this year.

Business conditions imposed by ministries and local authorities have reportedly become rampant though people are allowed to do business in the areas that are not banned by laws as clarified by the 2013 Constitution. The revised Investment Law clarifies six forbidden and 267 conditional business areas, which are much lower than nearly 400 conditional business sectors regulated in many legal documents earlier.

The Investment Law states that business and investment conditions should be contained in laws, ordinances, decrees and international treaties in which Vietnam is a signatory. Ministries, local authorities and individuals are not permitted to issue investment and business conditions.