Bureaucracy in Andorra: the procedures to open a business take between three and six months

Fifteen days is the deadline that aspires to achieve with the unified and digitized process opening and modification of shops which is expected to be launched in September; that in two weeks the processing necessary to start a business. A project to end an endemic problem: the slowness of the bureaucratic procedures of a process involving the central administration and the communal authorities. The Chamber of Commerce has asked companies this year about the administrative burden and the impact it entails and the answers confirm the long terms required by the process prior to starting the activity: between three and six months. It is the phase that generates the most concern, that ofauthorizations and administrative registrations prior to the start of the activity. An amount of time “too long for an economy that requires agility, responsiveness and ease of doing business”, shares the entity. And, he warns, an element that can end up becoming “a disincentive factor”. “When a person decides to undertake or invest, they need legal certainty, agility and predictable deadlines. If the procedures drag on for months, the cost of the project increases, uncertainty is generated and they may be postponed or even abandoned business initiatives”. The impact is particularly negative, he warns, when “most of the Andorran business fabric is made up of small companies and entrepreneurs, who are precisely those who have the least capacity to absorb delays and administrative costs”.

The announced process of simplification and digitization is obviously received as good news considering that lightening all this burden is a demand that the Chamber describes as “historic” for the time he insists on. The companies’ answers go in this direction: 62.4% consider it a priority to simplify procedures and reduce requirements; 43.9%, the complete digitization of processes; 42.9%, adapt the regulations to the reality of companies, and 34.6%, reduce response times. But the chamber he also warns that despite the fact that the new electronic procedure “is a step in the right direction”, it may be too short. “It will not be enough if it is not accompanied by a deep review of the processes”, they maintain. The reasoning is that “digitizing a complex procedure without first simplifying it does not eliminate bureaucracy; it simply transfers it from paper to the screen”. The survey carried out between January and February shows that the perception of the impact of bureaucracy maintains differences between sectors: that of the hotel industry and industry manifests more impact on the administrative burdenwhile real estate activities, administrative professionals and also the hotel industry complain particularly about the delays in resolving management. The body’s finding, however, is that the problem is not sectoral, but generalized. “Administrative difficulties affect the creation of new companies, changes of ownership, expansion of activity and many other usual procedures of the business life cycle”.

The bottlenecks

The results of the survey point to the three main areas leading the delays: the register of trade and industry, the immigration service and the register of companies. Everything related to starting a business. “From a business point of view, the main problem is not only the length of the procedures, but also the lack of predictability, which makes planning difficult of investments and projects”.

The recipe of chamber it involves “simplifying procedures, eliminating duplication, improving coordination between agencies, establishing more predictable deadlines, moving towards a single business window and accelerating the digital transformation of the administration”. And therefore, he defends that the “digitization must be part of a wider administrative reform that puts the focus on simplification, coordination between administrations and the effective reduction of deadlines”. In short, that “opening or expanding a business in Andorra be a process agile, transparent and competitive respect to the countries around us”. It will be necessary to see if the project led by Ministry of Economy meets expectations.