Hanoi (VNA)– Administrative procedures will continue to be reformed while more convenientservices for enterprises will be developed in Hanoi to help improve thebusiness climate and competitiveness of the capital city, said the municipalDepartment of Planning and Investment (DPI).

The city held a meeting on July 4 to look intoconvenient services that can assist companies with business registration.

Pham Thi Kim Tuyen, head of the DPI’s businessregistration division, said in the first six months of 2018, Hanoi grantedbusiness registration certificates to nearly 12,500 new firms with a totalcapital of more than 140 trillion VND (over 6 billion USD), down 0.2 percent involume but up 50 percent in capital.

Nearly 84,000 administrative dossiers werehandled, up 10.6 percent from the same period last year. Notably, 100 percentof business registration dossiers were submitted online.

She added that previously, it took businessesnine days to complete administrative procedures before starting operations.Since the beginning of this year, the DPI has been providing convenientservices to support business registration on its portal, thus cutting down thetime needed to complete those procedures to six days.

It has helped save time and money for businessesand reduce the workload for the DPI’s staff, Tuyen said.

Those services are provided in coordination withthe Hanoi Post and nine domestic commercial banks.

Nguyen Anh Tuan, Director of the Bizconsult lawfirm, believes that building convenient services to help with businessregistration is an achievement, as well as an inevitable move in the digitalera. They create a business climate where service providers, consultancies, andenterprises assist one another, thereby helping to reduce personnel, time, andcosts for businesses.

He asked the DPI to increase introducingservices of foreign banks to companies so as to diversify services and ensure equalitybetween businesses and banks.

At the meeting, the DPI said it is going to pushforward with administrative reforms, especially business registrationprocedures. It will put into use the service of making appointments viatelephone, as well as the SMS-sending service to update firms about thesettlement status of their dossiers. It will also manage business registrationdossiers via barcodes to keep a close watch on its employees’ work and thestatus of dossiers.

Meanwhile, organisations and citizens can givefeedback on the working quality and attitude of the DPI’s staff through either itsportal or feedback notes at its single-window section. The department alsopromised to regularly monitor and assess employees’ sense of responsibility,discipline, and activeness in their work, it added. -VNA.