Economy Ministry to draft laws to regulate activity of one-stop offices

The Ministry of Economy and Trade this year will work out and promote the legal framework for regulating the activity of one-stop offices or single payment-windows, Info-Prim Neo reports. As the head of the Economy Ministry’s structural policies division, Vadim Ceban, said in an interview, the issuing of documents that authorize entrepreneurial activities through one-stop offices turned out to be an effective method of reducing the time and costs incurred by the economic entities. Ceban said that the “one-stop office” method is now used by the State Registration Chamber, the Licensing Chamber, the Customs Service as well as by the Chisinau City Hall and 15 district administrations. But the absence of a common framework for implementing this scheme creates many problems. Therefore, an objective of the regulatory reform for 2008 is to work out the strategy for running one-stop offices and to introduce the changes resulting from it to the laws on entrepreneurship in force. Eugen Osmochescu, consultant of the secretariat of the working group set up under the state commission for promoting the regulatory reform, said that under a recently launched project financed by the United States Agency for International Development, the public authorities transmit online confirmations or certificates needed to issue licenses and authorizations, sparring the economic entities from going to courts. Osmochescu stated that since the start of this year, all the new draft normative or legislative documents regulating the entrepreneurial activity, which were worked out by the central public authorities, are presented at the meetings of the working group accompanied by informative notes that, besides legal assessment, include analyses of the economic-financial impact of these documents on the entrepreneurs. The working group cooperates with the divisions of the central public administration that analyze, monitor and assess the policies. The Academy of Public Administration under the President of Moldova organizes seminars and training courses of half a year for civil servants with the aim of widely implementing the practice of assessing the impact of the regulations on the process of formulating official documents. There will be printed a book teaching how to assess the impact of the regulatory documents. Osmocescu said that the best assessment of the impact of the regulations was attached to a draft decision proposed by the National Agency for Energy Regulation. The working group of the state commission for promoting the regulatory reform is waiting for the Parliament to accept the proposals to modify some ten laws made by the President of Moldova and the MPs while implementing Guillotine II (the law on the basic principles of regulating the entrepreneurial activity). They suggest delimiting the fiscal inspections, depriving the police of the right to carry out inspections at entrepreneurs (if only as part of criminal investigations) and simplifying the system of permits and authorizations issued to economic entities. The Parliament has already approved the amendments to 80 laws proposed by the Ministry of Economy and Trade. These amendments aim to reduce the administrative burden on economic entities and the cost of doing business in Moldova.