Top officials of the Philippines and New Zealand have reaffirmed their cooperation in two projects designed to improve ease of doing business in the Philippines and increase revenue collections from Manila’s airlines.
In a recent meeting with New Zealand Ambassador to Manila David Strachan, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III expressed his support for the two projects which are in sync with the priorities of the Department of Finance (DOF).
New Zealand, which Strachan said was ranked by the World Bank as the No.1 country in ease of doing business, has offered to send a mission of experts to Manila to help in the Philippine government’s initiatives to cut red tape and ensure a business-friendly environment for investors.
“We will welcome the support of Department of Finance to this initiative,” Strachan said.
Strachan informed Dominguez that the “experts will meet many government partners and other stakeholders and they will produce a series of recommendations that could contribute to the whole decision making process” of the Philippine government in its efforts to improve ease of doing business.
He added that the Philippines can learn from New Zealand’s program on operating a one-stop automated shop for business registrations, which has “resulted in immeasurable economic and social benefits.”
Meanwhile, the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), Strachan said, can adopt Airways New Zealand’s “Flight-Yield” automated aviation billing system to help increase government revenue collections from airline operators.
New Zealand’s Flight-Yield system automatically retrieves details of all flights and applies the appropriate charging policy for traffic control services provided these flights, allowing the correct fee to be computed for every flight made by an airline operator.
Dominguez said he will endorse New Zealand’s mission of experts, which has already gained the support of the Department of Trade and Industry, and direct the DOF’s anti-red tape czar, Undersecretary Gil Beltran, to take part in it.
Strachan said the Flight Yield system was first presented by New Zealand officials to CAAP in December 2014, but nothing came out of their discussions.
It was presented anew in October last year to the CAAP board, which said its finance committee would evaluate the proposal, according to Strachan.
Dominguez said he will instruct DOF officials to sit with CAAP officials to get the project going.
The finance chief also informed the ambassador of the significant progress made by the DOF to eliminate red tape at DOF’s attached agencies—Bureau of Internal Revenue and Bureau of Customs—and its partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology to set up a business and a citizen registry similar to the online system set up by Amazon for its customers.
Image courtesy of jk1991 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
