An opinion
How many times have we heard about the ease i.e. difficulty of doing business in Trinidad and Tobago? (Especially with COVID wreaking havoc on our traditional paper-based systems.) A lot of people may think that doing business in this country is so hard because we just have too much red tape. That’s a fair but simplistic viewpoint.
Bureaucracy’s Paradise
When you actually try to run a business here, you realize how many rules, regulations and hurdles you need to overcome. For example, do you know which taxes you have to pay if you are a corporation? How about when your taxes are due…or how you pay them? Exactly. If we want persons to start businesses and invest (and pay taxes), isn’t that information which should be readily available? So why isn’t it?
This can be the result of two separate but still linked reasons. First, our governance systems have remained largely paper-based while technology has raced ahead. There’s only so fast and easy you can make a system that has a million paper forms to fill out. Even when we try to put processes online, it ends up being the same system done through a computer. In other words, we are inputing information by typing instead of writing – there isn’t any automation or simplification of the actual system.
Second, we have rules…lots of rules. Everywhere. You don’t even know about these rules until you try to do something. So you only find out about all the rules as you go along. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was one process to do one thing but when you have different sets of rules that you don’t know about (or can’t find) for each stage of a process (that you also can’t find out about), then you’re rightfully going to be frustrated.
Running Wild
Of course, there’s a good reason we have rules. The laws and systems we have in place were meant to be checks and balances to prevent everything from fraud to the collapse of the entire financial system (see for example, the Financial Crisis of 2008) to money laundering and terrorist financing. Regulations can prevent serious harm. But it’s all about balance. Over-regulation will also strangle the ease of doing business.
Weights and Measures
So how do we fix it? Well, my first suggestion would be to at least have all the rules in one place. If you want to know how to do something, it shouldn’t be buried in some ancient legislation that you can’t even name. That means having a central government hub that is accessible and user-friendly. That’s the short-term goal.
The medium-to-long term is about overhauling the system itself. While rules are very important, we might benefit from some streamlining. C’mon, there’s no reason for a foreigner to fill out 14 forms when they’re docking their yacht, particularly when we need forex.
– Suriah J Heeraman