German aids Philippine campaign vs red tape with P21-M grant

MANILA, Philippines - The Duterte administration’s anti-red tape drive just got a boost from a P21.5-million grant from the German government, the Department of Finance (DOF) said yesterday.

The amount was given by German development bank Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW) and will finance “simplifying process in securing documentary requirements for imports and exports.”

It will help implement the inter-agency business process interoperability program, which aims to reduce time for issuing government permits to three days from two weeks.

“The major cause of red-tape in government is that agencies act and operate in isolation of each other,” Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said.

“The program aims to enforce transparent and accountable regulation processes and procedures in all relevant government agencies,” he said.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said the project would help the Philippines on its full integration with the rest of Southeast Asia by 2020, which already started last year.

“Our IT people are working closely with revenue people to make things like that as simple as possible,” Dominguez said.

“If Amazon can do that, I don’t know how many millions of customers; I think we can certainly do something like that,” he said.

Dominguez appointed Beltran as DOF’s anti-red tape czar shortly after taking over, in charge of streamlining process on the agency and its attached offices, including the bureaus of Internal Revenue and Customs.

Earlier, DOF also said Beltran is leading the establishment of a business and citizens data banks by the first quarter of 2017.

Both database will link up records from various agencies such as the BIR, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Home Development Mutual Fund of Pag-IBIG, Philippine Health Corp. and Philippine Statistics Authority.