Businesses say reform has brought more troubles The Hanoi Planning and Investment Department has complained that it has been overloaded over the last month since the new Enterprise and Investment Laws took effect.   From July 1 to July 24, the department received 10,054 business registrations, twice as many in the first quarter of the year. The department’s one-stop shop division sometime receives 1,600 visitors a day. Pham Thi Kim Tuyen, head of the business registration division. said the staff often finished working at 7 pm because there were too many documents to deal with. Even so, the overloading still exists. “In principle, the working day finishes at 4 pm, but we have to stay at the office until we can finish the work of the days,” she said. At the office, there are so many documents that there is not enough room for them. Documents are piled up in the corridor and tops of cabinets. According to Tuyen, some additional procedures are required under the new Enterprise Law. The workload her staff has to fulfill for every business registrations is 40 percent higher than previously. With the new law, business information must be made public. And state agencies will have to deal with even more procedures. It takes officers a great deal of time to scan the notifications about businesses’ stamp samples to post on the national information portal because of the errors of the portal and the bad transmission line. Tuyen admitted that the most time-consuming work was in the business field and stamp registration procedures. An officer from An Viet Law Firm noted that it takes him at least three days to follow the procedure on providing information about stamp samples. “It takes businesses seven days, not including Saturday and Sunday, to complete the registration of a business, if everything goes smoothly,” he said. Phuong from Covi Law Firm also confirmed that the required procedures were even more complicated that before. “We still have to encode business fields though we think the new law does not require this,” she said. The biggest problem is that decrees and circulars that guide the implementation of the Enterprise Law have not been released, though the law was enacted seven months ago. Thoi Bao Kinh Te Sai Gon quoted a report of the Ministry of Justice as saying that government agencies still owe 54 legal documents that need to be issued to guide the implementation of 10 laws that took effect on July 1. Pham Huyen, VNN