Aleem Khan

T&T is mak­ing progress on its ease of do­ing busi­ness, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and the Econ­o­my Lar­ry Howai said in the Sen­ate on June 4.Speak­ing dur­ing de­bate of the Cus­toms Amend­ment Bill 2013, Howai said: "It is im­por­tant that we seek to im­ple­ment this par­tic­u­lar leg­is­la­tion be­cause it deals with the ease of do­ing busi­ness, which has been a ma­jor ob­jec­tive of the Gov­ern­ment."

Howai said: "If I may be al­lowed just to fo­cus on a few of the ar­eas re­lat­ing to ease of do­ing busi­ness on which this par­tic­u­lar ini­tia­tive builds, I would say that, first, as you would be aware, Mr Pres­i­dent, ear­li­er on when the Fi­nance Act was read, we amend­ed the VAT Act to make it manda­to­ry for the Board of In­land Rev­enue to ef­fect reg­is­tra­tion for VAT in one day. We amend­ed the NIB Act to make it manda­to­ry for reg­is­tra­tion al­so with­in one day.

"We re­moved the re­quire­ment to em­boss Ar­ti­cles of In­cor­po­ra­tion and pay the $25 stamp du­ty, again, as a way of re­mov­ing some of the ir­ri­tants in­volved in do­ing busi­ness. We al­so have put name reser­va­tion, busi­ness reg­is­tra­tion and com­pa­ny in­cor­po­ra­tion on­line, through the sin­gle elec­tron­ic win­dow at the Min­istry of Trade, In­dus­try and In­vest­ment."

The min­is­ter said sev­er­al oth­er ini­tia­tives are cur­rent­ly be­ing worked on "in the area of con­struc­tion per­mit­ting in the area of trad­ing across bor­ders...to im­prove the ease of do­ing busi­ness here in T&T and, again, to po­si­tion our­selves in a glob­al­ly-com­pet­i­tive way, giv­en the po­si­tion­ing, as I spoke to ear­li­er, of T&T in a glob­al com­mu­ni­ty".

The ease of do­ing busi­ness in­dex is con­duct­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion (IFC) and its par­ent, the World Bank Group. T&T moved up one spot in the lat­est in­ter­na­tion­al rank­ings.The Do­ing Busi­ness project, launched in 2002, looks at do­mes­tic small and medi­um-size com­pa­nies and mea­sures the reg­u­la­tions ap­ply­ing to them through their life cy­cle in 185 economies.In the Do­ing Busi­ness 2013 re­port, Trinidad and To­ba­go ranks 69 out of 185 economies. In the 2012 re­port, T&T ranked 70.