Centre Plans To Reduce Compliance For Businesses By August 15

The government is conducting an exercise that shall be put into effect in two phases by August 15 for reducing the compliance burden in 10 of the areas that adversely impact time and cost of businesses.

For the first phase where the deadline is March 31, the compliance work will be eased in six areas which do not require changes to any legislation. The areas include removal of renewal requirement in case of licences; conducting third party or joint inspections along with government authorities; standardizing and simplification of returns filings and reducing the number of filing requirement, doing away with maintenance of records and registers; minimizing or removing the need for display in case of licenses, and digitizing and simplifying all manual records and procedures.

Furthermore in the final phase to be implemented by August 15, compliance shall be relaxed in four areas that need amendments in current laws. The areas include evaluation of regulations in respect of time and cost for business and putting in place 'one-in-one-out policy; identification and decriminalization of regulations that require imprisonment for minor offences; identification and change of archaic laws and rules; and aggressive deployment of new-age technologies including blockchain, artificial intelligence, chat-bots and DigiLocker.

"The cabinet secretary is taking two to three meetings every month to review progress. There are five key central government ministries such as finance, commerce, corporate affairs, mines and health that need to reduce a major chunk of the compliances," Mohapatra, industry secretary added.

On Friday, PM Modi said that the centre plans to eliminate as many as 6000 compliance requirements for businesses both at the state and central level this year for enabling ease of doing business in India.

GoodReturns.in