THE Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) said it will set up a pilot operation in Metro Manila within two months to test a one-stop shop system for business registration.
In a statement Wednesday, the DTI said its Ease of Doing Business-Anti Red Tape Authority (EODB-ARTA) Advisory Council will create the National Business One-Stop Shop (NBOSS). The NBOSS aims to reduce the business registration process to five steps, promising a transaction time of three to six days.
Trade Secretary Ramon M. Lopez told BusinessWorld Wednesday he hopes NBOSS “will be set up in two months.”
NBOSS will gather in one location per region all government agencies involved in the registration process. These agencies include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth), Social Security Services (SSS), Home Development Mutual Fund (Pag-IBIG), and the local government units (LGUs).
“The idea is to have an end-to-end process where an entrepreneur wanting to register a business need not go physically to several agencies and the LGU. This in a way is a preview to the eventual end-to-end registration to be done in an online portal. The ultimate ease of doing business is really doing things online and with the use of smartphones,” Mr. Lopez said in a statement Wednesday.
The online portal will be developed in partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT). The portal will enable users to register their businesses in just one hour.
Mr. Lopez said that NBOSS will be operated for about one year while the registration process is brought fully online.
“We will run until necessary, maybe one year, until the full automation of this end-to-end process,” he said. — Gillian M. Cortez
