Big admin hurdles still remain

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) last week launched a draft assessment on the Vietnamese government’s administrative procedure simplification programme, known as Project 30.

The assessment was carried out by the organisation during September 2010 under a Vietnamese government requirement, which strongly believed that opinions contributed from experienced OECD experts and their recommendations for the government to act upon.

Vietnam is in Project 30’s third phase, the implementation of administrative procedure reform, which was launched from late 2007. The second phase focused on reviewing the whole country’s administrative procedures and was completed this year.

Ngo Hai Phan, deputy head of the government’s Special Task Force for Administrative Procedure Reform, said 4,818 out of 5,000 administrative procedures have been submitted to the prime minister for simplification. Of that, 480 procedures were proposed to be abrogated, 4,146 procedures changed and 192 procedures replaced.

The central government and relevant ministries will have to change and abrogate 1,016 legal documents including laws, ordinances, decrees, decisions, circulars and other legal documents to the second half of next year.

“There will be many difficulties and challenges ahead. It is definitely important to have the participation and cooperation of the whole political system, particularly the people and business community to supervise the implementation progress.

“Implementation is challenging. We need to promote and speed-up the progress with stronger decisiveness for fruitful results,” Phan said.

The OECD experts also agreed that administrative simplification in Vietnam had reached a crucial stage.

“Project 30 has proven very efficient in taking stock of the complexity and in defining the content of simplification measures,” said OECD’s deputy secretary general Mario Amano.

While acknowledging Vietnam was on the right track to reach its targets of reducing compliance costs, Amano said that “much remains to be done” and “the simplification proposal must be now translated into reality”.

“It must be sure that changes are felt by businesses and citizens. Effective implementation is crucial for the success of the administrative simplification,” Amano stressed.

According to the OECD, Project 30 must be a step forward and create business growth and good public governance.

The organisation recommended the government adopt a single explicit and government-wide regulatory policy to sustain economic and social progress.

The government is also advised to invest in building capacities for assessments of impacts to move towards evidence-based policy making, strengthen government dialogue with citizens and businesses and make additional reductions.

“Comprehensive cooperation with all stake holders in the society should not only be carried out in implementation, but also in new regulation making process,” said OECD expert Daniel Trika.

“Development of a comprehensive regulatory reform policy should include all of these elements plus qualification and consolidation of existing regulations as well as monitoring and evaluation of regulatory reform,” Trika said.