THE Catalan SMEs They spend an average of 41.1 hours per week managing procedures with the public administration, which already has 70% of the documents it requests from businesses and which takes an average of 136 days to resolve requests, according to a study of Pimec.
This is how the president of Pimec explained it, Antoni Caneteand the president of the SME Observatory, Oriol Amatduring the press conference presenting the study Bureaucracy and business competitiveness: Diagnosis and proposals.
The study analyzes the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of public administration in Catalonia and Spain as a whole, focusing on business competitiveness, particularly in SMEs.
Thanks to surveys of 700 employees, the employers’ organization detected that the main administrative obstacles are excessive bureaucracylong processing times, lack of inter-administrative coordination and regulatory complexity.
Concretely, 85% of companies have difficulty keeping up to date with regulations and 48% have suffered from coordination problems between administrations, which for 20% constitutes a “very significant obstacle”.
In addition, SMEs took on average 166 days to receive a subsidy since the resolution. On the other hand, 80% of small businesses believe that the time required to complete a procedure is “excessive or very long”.
Don’t fall for “Groundhog Day”
Cañete regretted that the time invested in paperwork That’s “a time virtually equivalent to a worker’s weekly shift,” and he advocated not falling into literal “Groundhog Day.”
He assured that bureaucracy harms the competitiveness and innovation of businesses. He gave an example with the case of a company in Baix Camp (Tarragona), which took three years to obtain authorization and which was then no longer able to carry out its activity.
“Every time there is an electoral process, administrative simplification, debureaucratization and the one-stop shop are on the agenda, but we are where we were a long time ago,” he criticized.
Asked about the administrative reform who wants to execute the GovernmentCañete chose to move from words to “concrete and immediate action” and reaffirmed that a country cannot function without budgets.
Scanning pending
The study identifies that there is great potential for digitalization of procedures and simplification of processes, but only if these actions are accompanied by a structural revision of regulations and procedures.
In this sense, Amat presented the actions proposed by the study, including the creation of a one-stop shop, the digital transformationtraining of administrative staff and administrative simplification, particularly in small towns and rural areas.
