By Tyrone Jasper C. Piad
The Anti-Red Tape Authority (Arta) is set to create a technical working group (TWG) tasked with developing methodologies or criteria for the localized Doing Business (DB) report.
Arta Director General Jeremiah Belgica raised the proposal in a recent meeting of the Ease of Doing Business (EODB) and Anti-Red Tape Advisory Council, which it approved as well.
The TWG will be led by Arta Deputy Director General for Operations Ernesto Perez and will be comprised by the members of the said council.
Crafting a “more personalized and localized” version of the DB report, Belgica said, will bode well for the EODB efforts of the government agencies.
“We will do a little bit more of contextualizing in the Philippine system for the benefit of our government…so we can see if we are improving from where we used to be. The participation of the private sector is indispensable in the entire system that we are hoping to have,” he added.
The anti-red tape agency is also eyeing to launch a Report Card Survey, which seeks to measures the EODB compliance of government agencies.
Arta will coordinate with the Civil Service Commission and the Philippine Statistics Authority in rolling out the said initiative.
The move to localize the DB report came after the World Bank’s (WB) announcement that it would discontinue the said survey after finding “data irregularities” due to potential manipulation.
In a recent statement, WB revealed there were “data irregularities” in the Doing Business 2018 and 2020 reports that raised ethical issues, referring to the conduct of some officials while doing the research. An external investigation concluded that former World Bank chief executive Kristalina Georgieva and former World Bank president Jim Yong Kim applied “undue pressure” to boost the data points of China.
The international financial institution said they are crafting new methodologies to assess the business and investment climate.