Getting trade permits to go online soon
The Department of Finance (DOF) has already secured the commitment of 65 government agencies that must accept applications for export and import permits under an online platform in order to further ease doing business in the country.
In a statement Monday, the DOF said only 11 of the 76 regulatory agencies issuing permits to exporters and importers had yet to join efforts to reduce red tape under the so-called “TradeNet.”
In relation to the move to make trade across the Asean region seamless, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said that “initial tests on the country’s interconnection with other [neighboring] economies, starting with Indonesia via the Asean Single Window, had been successful, with development and testing to continue in the next few weeks.”
Beltran, who is also the DOF’s antired tape czar, said the interconnection tests under the Asean Single Window would go on until May not only in the Philippines but also in Brunei and Cambodia.
Locally, the DOF and the Department of Information and Communications Technology last December launched the TradeNet platform under the National Single Window, in which all 76 agencies must participate to make the system fully operational.
“The TradeNet platform for traders, which will also serve as the Philippines’ link to the Asean Single Window gateway, is expected to minimize the costs of doing business and cut the processing time for the issuance of import and export permits,” Beltran said.
With regards the link between TradeNet and the Asean Single Window, Beltran admitted that “there were some gaps in the responses between the two systems” even as the Philippines’ connection with Indonesia under the regional gateway was a success.
“The Bureau of Customs is set to identify five exporters who will pilot test TradeNet this month, while a team will do a demonstration on the integrated importer accreditation module, which aims to simplify the accreditation process for importers. This module will later link accreditation records of regulatory agencies to the BOC records to form a full importer profile,” according to Beltran. —BEN O. DE VERA
