Regulatory Reform Goes On-Line in Moldova
USAID’s BIZPRO/Moldova Regulatory Reform team presented a status update on the new reform Web portal at a meeting on May 12, 2005 hosted by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI), Cahul branch. Twenty-five Council Secretaries from Cahul Region villages and towns as well as the Secretary of Cahul Region attended the roundtable. Discussion was led by Simion Platon, Director of CCI Cahul. These key players in the rayon were brought together through Platon’s leadership and his recognition that when it comes to implementation, the understanding and support of grassroots local government is essential. The roundtable theme “Establishing a Registry of Regulatory Acts at the Community Level” was designed to walk Council Secretaries through the process of organizing and accessing the new national registry of regulatory acts. Putting this registry on-line is mandated by Moldova’s new Law on Reviewing the Legal and Regulatory Framework for Business Activity (Guillotine). While the technology that supports this comprehensive database is complex, great care has been taken to make the interface highly user-friendly, saving time and avoiding confusion for both public authorities and entrepreneurs. Accessibility over the Internet makes the information available anywhere, anytime. The presentation by BIZPRO/Moldova staff provided future database users with a hands-on preview on how to pinpoint legal information and take advantage of the flexibility and power of the on-line database. The Council Secretaries were shown screen shots from the on-line registry, detailing every significant step in the process of posting acts on the portal or searching for and retrieving information.
Providing future database users with familiarity with the tool will prove invaluable when the portal goes live. The presentation showed how accessibility over the Internet makes the information available anywhere, anytime. And through the central hub, all regions can connect with each other. Reports can be displayed in a wide variety of formats and at many different levels of detail. BIZPRO-Moldova’s Strategic Development Partner, CCI Cahul, made a presentation about its experience in operating the recently established one-stop-shop for trade and business registration the “Unic Plus On-line”. The Cahul one-stop-shop is the first in Moldova’s to issue permits for trade activity. Even more significantly, Cahul is the only region in Moldova to have created and connected a virtual one-stop-shop. This new facility reverses the old approach that required an entrepreneur to go to as many as five government offices, presenting the same information time and time again. Now, the one-stop-shop allows business owners to deliver their basic information to a single collection point, put on-line, and distribute it to all necessary government offices electronically. Based on feedback from the group, there is strong interest in expanding the geographical coverage of on-line one-stop-shops to include all towns and villages from Cahul Region. It was this interest that sparked the idea for a regional meeting, bringing together at the CCI Cahul Branch offices the local officials whose support of the tools and processes of Regulatory Reform is so crucial to its success. "“Since we’ve opened we received five business applications. Even though it is a small number to assess the impact of this facility, it suggests that entrepreneurs do not fully understand their legal obligations in running a business,” says Simion Platon." Both topics stimulated lively discussions about opportunities for further expanding the business information network by setting up a establishing a registry of regulatory acts at the community level. The concept calls for using a similar approach to the one being developed at the Ministry of Economy and Trade with the Cahul Region taking leadership in maintaining the public/private partnership by increasingly involving local government in promoting regulatory reform efforts. As part of the Regulatory Reform communications outreach, information posters displaying the USAID and Moldova Regulatory Reform brand marks were distributed to all participants. The posters will now be displayed in local Council offices throughout Cahul Region in conjunction with other information products such as brochures and flash cards that provide points of contact for citizens and entrepreneurs.
