A report was recently released on the costs of administrative procedure compliance in Vietnam, known as APCI, helping to quantify the costs that businesses have to bear in order to meet existing regulations.

The application of IT is expected to help Vietnam cut administrative costs. (Image: Thoi bao tai chinh) 

Among the eight groups of administrative procedures concerning the operation of a business, the gap between the first and last group is enormously wide. Specifically, it takes VND73,750 and 2.9 working hours to complete a tax procedure, while it takes a whopping VND64.1 million and 108.9 hours for a construction procedure.

The results accurately reflect the contrast in the reform efforts of the two agencies responsible for these two areas. With its commitment and determination to modernise the tax sector, the General Department of Taxation (GDT) immediately took action after the government introduced Resolution 19 on improving the business environment in 2014. The wave of reform has spread from the GDT to local tax bureaus.

Furthermore, the GDT requested that the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry conduct an annual survey on the satisfaction of enterprises and use the results to assess its reform process. The strong application of information technology in the handling of tax administrative procedures has brought about a positive effect, helping to save time and cut costs for both the government and enterprises, and most importantly removing the direct contact between enterprises and tax officers, which has contributed to lowering informal costs.

Meanwhile, for construction procedures, it takes enterprises a great deal of time to prepare their dossiers and they even have to make frequent visits to the construction authorities in order to modify and supplement their dossiers at the request of the authorities.

A company reported that it had to modify its dossiers four times for a total of 200 working hours to complete the construction permit procedure. It is worth noting that the four closely connected groups of land, investment, environment and construction all occupy the bottom positions on the APCI 2018 report.

Many recommendations have been put forward on forming a single series of procedures between the agencies in charge of these four areas since 2014, when the government began taking action to simplify administrative procedures, but to date such recommendations have yet to be institutionalised. As a result, enterprises still have to prepare the same dossiers to submit them to different agencies.

Such a fact shows that a general view of the institutional system based on the foundation of technology is required. There remains large room for reform, which depends on the determination of the leaders at state management agencies and the level of IT application in each sector.

Nhan Dan