The Gov­ern­ment is work­ing hard to re­duce the length of time it takes to do busi­ness in T&T by elim­i­nat­ing all ex­ces­sive reg­u­la­tions and bu­reau­cra­cy that hin­der the way T&T con­duct busi­ness, says Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz. In the last two week, Cadiz has re­in­forced the con­sis­tent mes­sage of the Gov­ern­ment's se­ri­ous­ness in tack­ling the bu­reau­cra­cy in sev­er­al speech­es and in­ter­views he has giv­en. "If we want to boost the econ­o­my and im­prove the way we do busi­ness, we have to stop op­er­at­ing un­der all these ar­cha­ic laws and reg­u­la­tions," Cadiz said. Cadiz was mak­ing ref­er­ence to the ar­cha­ic laws un­der which Cus­toms and Ex­cise was op­er­at­ing.

The Gov­ern­ment is work­ing on leg­is­la­tion to would im­prove do­ing busi­ness in T&T with plans to ta­ble the Da­ta Pro­tec­tion and Pri­va­cy Bill and the Elec­tron­ic Trans­ac­tions Bill in Par­lia­ment be­fore year's end. There will al­so be the "much need­ed" amend­ment to the Ex­che­quer and Au­dit Act. These bills will pro­vide the leg­isla­tive frame­work for the de­liv­ery of Gov­ern­ment ser­vices through the In­ter­net and mo­bile de­vices. Oth­er parts of the Gov­ern­ment are al­so at­tempt­ing to lessen the bu­reau­cra­cy and im­prove the ef­fi­cien­cy of the de­liv­ery of gov­ern­ment ser­vices in the coun­try through the use of In­for­ma­tion, Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT). The Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion is work­ing on im­ple­ment­ing the T&T Gov­ern­ment Wide Area Net­work (WAN), known as Gov­NeTT which will link all gov­ern­ment min­istries.

He not­ed that the ex­ces­sive reg­u­la­tions, bu­reau­cra­cy and lack of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty were con­tribut­ing to the loss of T&T's com­pet­i­tive­ness. "We have to cut away the all these reg­u­la­tions and bu­reau­cra­cy," he said. "It takes 115 days to set up a busi­ness while it takes Ja­maica about two weeks...this can­not be," he added. He stat­ed if Ja­maica which has the same his­to­ry like T&T can do it, then why can't T&T. Ear­li­er this month the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance Cor­po­ra­tion re­vealed in its Do­ing Busi­ness sur­vey that T&T fell 16 places with­in a year, mov­ing from 81 in 2010 to at 97 in 2011. Cadiz said, "Ac­tu­al­ly T&T ranked 42 eight years ago, so that is not a very good track record...this is a sober­ing sta­tis­tic," he said.

It was for this rea­son Cadiz said that the Gov­ern­ment was es­tab­lish­ing the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow called the TTBi­zlink. He said it was sched­uled to come on stream in Jan­u­ary 2011, which will in­te­grate all rel­e­vant gov­ern­ment agen­cies in­volved in do­ing busi­ness at the Port of Port-of-Spain. "When ful­ly op­er­a­tional, it would rev­o­lu­tionise the way trade and busi­ness is con­duct­ed in T&T," he added. "No longer would there be a need for mul­ti­ple forms and re­peat­ed trips to sev­er­al dif­fer­ent agen­cies," Cadiz said. TTBi­zlink will con­nect five Gov­ern­ment min­istries and 13 agen­cies in­volved in the trade ap­provals. Some ben­e­fits de­rived from this IT so­lu­tion in­clude greater op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy, in­crease in the speed of busi­ness and trade trans­ac­tions and sharp­en­ing the com­pet­i­tive edge of com­pa­nies and in­dus­tries.

There are eight mod­ules which com­prise the core TTBi­zlink that were de­vel­oped in con­junc­tion with users and op­er­a­tors in­clud­ing per­mit and li­cens­es, im­port du­ty con­ces­sion, work per­mit ap­pli­ca­tion and com­pa­ny reg­is­tra­tion. Dur­ing the ques­tion and an­swer seg­ment on Tues­day at the T&T Cham­ber and In­dus­try's quar­ter­ly lun­cheon at its head of­fice in West­moor­ings, Cadiz was ques­tioned by Per­cy Lall, a cus­toms bro­ker, who ex­pressed con­cern that TTBi­zlink may re­place bro­kers in the fu­ture. Cadiz as­sured him that every­one would still have a role to play. How­ev­er, Cadiz told the var­i­ous busi­ness ex­ec­u­tives present at the lun­cheon to broad­en their base and look to new mar­kets. He said it was im­per­a­tive that the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty deep­en and widen its trade re­la­tions.

"You need to crank it up to an­oth­er lev­el...look be­yond Cari­com," he said. He added that the Gov­ern­ment was will­ing to fa­cil­i­tate the process. He al­so called on them to max­imise on all the dif­fer­ent trade agree­ments and in­sti­tu­tions that would al­low them this op­por­tu­ni­ty. But Philippe Agos­ti­ni, ex­ec­u­tive chair­man of CGA Ltd said, "While I un­der­stand we must move be­yond that, we need to pre­serve what we have with Cari­com." Agos­ti­ni stat­ed that T&T was the ma­jor ben­e­fi­cia­ry of Cari­com. Cadiz al­so called on the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to part­ner with the Gov­ern­ment to deal with the is­sue of crime as they too had a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.