“The more contacts with citizens and enterprises, the more opportunities for government employees to ‘make harassment,’” said Nguyen Duc Chi, chief of the Finance Ministry’s Reform Working Group, using a euphemism for taking bribes. Chi was addressing a meeting with the government’s administrative reform group last week that was covered by VietNamNet newspaper.

Chi said it is hard to ask tax and customs officers to give cumbersome procedures that serve their individual interest.

Because complexity is profitable at the grassroots, some 239 administrative procedures exist in the customs sector, including 197 formalities at customs branches, speculated the vice chief of the General Department of Customs, Hoang Viet Cuong.

Cuong said the simplification of customs procedures will be carried out flexibly. The Customs Department will decide which formalities will be dropped and then send the list to local units for making comment. This method, Cuong said, will help prevent customs officers from hindering the process because they don’t want to reduce its complexity.

“Every low-level office wants the right to decide what’s allowable, because that forces enterprises to beg for their favour,” Cuong said.

The vice chief of the government’s administrative reform group, Ngo Hai Phan, took issue. The reform process must be ‘bottom up’ as well as ‘top down,’ he emphasized. It is necessary to let employees who directly work with enterprises and citizens to analyze irregular procedures and nominate them for elimination.

Phan said that the goal of the Government’s Project 30 is not only to cut down formalities but also to heighten officials’ professionalism and sense of responsibility.

Phan agreed with the General Department of Taxation’s suggestion to solicit proposals from local tax offices, and then to discuss these with the Tax Consulting Council and experts.

Is the goal of reducing red tape by 30 percent feasible?

The Finance Ministry is known as an agency with limitless ‘administrative formalities.’ Ministry officials expressed doubt that they can meet their 30 percent reduction quota, certainly not by phase II deadlines. The ministry is supposed to complete its review of ways to speed up an initial 86 tax and customs procedures and report to the Prime Minister by October 30.

Chi, the head of the ministry working group, offered that the top official in each functional area will bear responsibility for the pace and quality of procedural checking. The ministry will track progress in regular meetings.

Cuong of the Customs Office said that during the review process, administrative procedures should be streamlined. In terms of number of formalities, it seems that procedures are not reduced but that they are processed more quickly.

The Finance Ministry plans to immediately eliminate irregular formalities found during the checking process but this is a difficult job because related circulars and decrees will have to be amended, Cuong explained.

Phan, the Project 30 manager, replied that the ministry can issue a single order to amend dozens of documents at one stroke.

The Finance Minister is the responsible decision-maker for all irregular procedures within the sole competence of the ministry. Abolition of formalities that are associated with more than one ministries and agencies will be decided by the Prime Minister’s Office. The 30 percent target is a flexible figure, Phan said.

In the first phase of project 30, the Finance Ministry counted 840 separate procedures.

Deputy PM Nguyen Sinh Hung recently criticized the relatively slow pace of administrative reforms in the fields of taxation and customs.

What is Project 30?

Vietnam's administrative procedures have always been criticised for being complicated and confusing. Project 30 is a Government-wide initiative to simplify administrative procedures that affect businesses and the general public. There are three main evaluation criteria: legality, necessity and rationality.

The project will create the first ever national-scale centralised database of all administrative procedures at all government levels, which will be accessible to the public on the internet.

During the first phase of Project 30 (January 2007 to March 2008), an inventory was made of all administrative procedures at all government levels. The project is supervised by a Government Special Task Force led by the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. There are 84 subordinate working groups in 21 ministries, two independent agencies and 61 provinces and cities.

The Project 30 website was launched in December 2008 (www.thutuchanhchinh.vn).  An English version of the site has been available since February.

During the second stage of Project 30 (mid-2009 to mid-2010), all procedures and related documents will be reviewed against the criteria of legality, necessity and rationality.

In the final stage, the last quarter of 2010, suggestions for simplification will be implemented and the database of procedures will be made public.

It is expected that by the end of 2010, individuals and organisations will be able to access the database to explore and research requirements or conditions for administrative procedures at all Government levels across the country, as well as print out hard copies of forms to fill out, instead of waiting for hours at administrative offices.

An advisory council for administrative procedure reform was formed with representatives from domestic and foreign associations, research institutes and enterprises, to speak on behalf of the people and enterprises in the reform process.

Source: Vietnamnet