Monday, December 17, 2007 City eyes 1T new business applications
AROUND 1,000 new business establishments are expected to apply for business permits next month as General Santos City institutes a major procedural change in obtaining the license, officials said Friday.
Coralynn Espinosa, head of the City Economic Management and Cooperative Development Office, said under the new procedure new applicants need not present a registration certificate from the Bureau of Internal Revenue to register.
"A major change in procedure next year is that the local BIR registration is not anymore a requirement. After we issued them the business permit, they could go to the local revenue office and be registered," Espinosa told reporters.
Espinosa said the "one-stop shop" for business permit application and renewal would kick off on January 2 until January 20 at the oval plaza covered court.
Based on data from the city business licensing division, there are 6,355 existing business establishments operating in the city, many of them micro, small, and medium enterprises.
They are expected to renew their business permits.
For several years now, Mayor Pedro Acharon, Jr. said the city has adopted a "one-stop shop" where businesses renewing their licenses can do the transaction much faster.
The shop houses agencies of local and national government departments whose signatures are needed for the issuance of a business permit.
Before such program, these agencies are scattered all over the locality, which means that an applicant has to spend money for gas or fare just to get the signatures of officials located in various parts of the city.
City treasurer Rodilon Lacap earlier said the City Government experimented with the program in 1998 after getting complaints from local businessmen about the punishing process in renewing their licenses.
"We call it the one-stop shop wherein all the required signatures for the renewal of business permits are all under one roof. We've been getting positive feedbacks since the time we started the undertaking," Lacap said earlier.
Pilar Afuang, executive director of the local chamber of commerce and industry, said it is much easier now for them to renew their business permits than before the one-stop shop was implemented.
In adopting the one-stop shop, Lacap said the City Government "wants to be a model of good governance" in a bid to further encourage investors' confidence in the locality.
"If we want more capital investments coming in, we must practice good governance as this is also being used as barometer by businessmen in putting up or expanding their businesses," he said.
Because of the one-stop shop, Lacap said the business renewal process was reduced at least seven times than before and that this resulted to a shorter transaction time, benefiting not only the business sector but also the government employees.
This city is the undisputed "Tuna Capital of the Philippines," an industry that gave way to the mushrooming of thousands of micro, small and medium scale enterprises that helped fan local economic growth.
