Govt. to fast-track company registration process to 24 hours

By Chandeepa Wettasinghe 
Investors will be soon able to register their companies within 24 hours via the Company Registrar’s Office, Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake said.

“We’ve had some complaints that it takes 2-3 weeks to register a company. So we asked Industry and Commerce Minister Rishard Bathiudeen to see if companies could be registered within 24 hours, and he agreed,” Karunanayake said.

He added that Bathiudeen had agreed to fast track the information retrieval process from the Company Registrar to 24 hours as well. Providing bureaucratic services within 24 hours will be essential to the success of the government’s plans to make Sri Lanka a global financial hub.
The government is also hoping to attract high levels of foreign direct investment to the country’s export sector in order to push the economic growth up to 7-8 percent in the coming years, from 4.8 percent in 2015, and the projected 5 to 5.5 percent levels this year.

Even though the United National Party, the leading political group within the national unity government, is comprised mainly of businessmen, a recent competitiveness ranking report by the World Economic Forum showed Sri Lanka’s competitiveness dropped 3 ranks this year to 71st place, globally. While the report found policy instability to be the main culprit for Sri Lanka’s restricted ease of doing business, inefficient bureaucracy was also noted to be a leading problem.
Karunanayake has been conducting ‘Ease of Doing Business’ meetings with the private sector for over one year now, where he attempts to give immediate solutions for problems that businessmen have encountered.
The government has also said that it is attempting to make processes smoother at main investor touch points such as the Board of Investment.