The Philippine government is finalizing a new, faster system for securing import applications that currently involves more than 60 government agencies, part of fresh measures to cut red tape and improve the ease of doing business in the Philippines, according to Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III.
Dominguez said the government is now consolidating all requirements involving applications for imports to drastically shorten the import process and make this new system available online.
“We are working very closely with the Department of Information and Communications Technology on this effort. We have gotten the majority of the different units to already agree that if it is approved by one, it should be basically approved by all,” Dominguez said at a recent business forum.
The finance chief said he is aware that applying for import permits is a tedious process that requires approvals from as many as 60 different government agencies, and he has directed Department of Finance (DOF) officials to help coordinate the effort to cut red tape within the bureaucracy, starting with import requirements.
In a report to Dominguez, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said an online platform that will modernize and fast-track the processing of import and export permits is now being finalized by the DOF with other government agencies and could be available soon.
The single platform, dubbed as TradeNet, aims to connect 66 agencies and 10 economic zones involved in approving import and export permits.
“We have identified all essential activities and action items needed in preparation for the production rollout of the TradeNet system,” Beltran, DOF’s anti-red tape czar, said at a recent DOF Executive Committee meeting.
Beltran said the target is to integrate TradeNet’s activities with those of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Single Window (ASW) and “go live by December 2017.”
ASW is an electronic gateway that enables seamless, standardized, and harmonized routing and communication of trade and customs-related information and data for customs clearance and release among the national single windows (NSWs) of ASEAN member countries. A working NSW is needed to connect to ASW.
So far, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand are already using the ASW to exchange information on customs clearances.
With TradeNet, Beltran said, the application process for imports and exports would be dramatically reduced from the current months to only a week or even less.
He said the DOF and DICT may start off with streamlining the processing of permits at the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) and the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) of the Department of Agriculture. This is after the issues involving the end-to-end walkthrough of the accreditation, import, and export modules of TradeNet for these agencies were threshed out last August 9.
“The TradeNet accreditation module is designed to consolidate the database of all agencies when they accredit traders for import and export,” said Beltran, who is also the DOF’s chief economist.
Last year, DOF secured a P21.5 million grant from German development bank KfW Group to help implement TradeNet.
Dominguez said the grant is now helping implement the Inter-Agency Business Process Interoperability (IABPI) Program, which aims to streamline the process of issuing permits for imports and exports.
The IABPI is being implemented by the DOF’s policy development and management services group headed by Beltran in coordination with the government’s trade regulatory agencies.
Aside from simplifying import-export documentation processes, the program targets developing policies to “oversee, manage and harmonize transactions of all regulatory agencies” involved in these processes by establishing protocols to link their databases with each other.
The program also aims to enforce “transparent and accountable regulation processes and procedures [in] all relevant government agencies” and ensure that these are sustained.
Aside from TradeNet, DOF and DICT are currently working on making the Philippine Business Data Bank (PBDB) fully operational down to the local government level to drastically cut red tape in business registrations.
A dry run of the PBDB was conducted last August 14 at the Department of Trade and Industry, which already has its application program interface for the business registry up and running.
Last August 16, the PBDB was launched at the 5th Annual Regional Competitiveness Summit at the Philippine International Convention Center (PICC) in Manila to introduce the system to local government units and encourage them to link up with the data bank.
So far, the Quezon City government has already submitted its data to the PBDB.
Image courtesy of hywards at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
