“Bureaucracy is the death of any achievement.” – Albert Einstein
Is that so?
In terms of business, one thing we can all agree on is that bureaucracy means more paperwork and inefficiency which leads to delay in achieving our objectives or to an excuse for inaction.
The bureaucratic process lends itself to criticism. It is often considered to be synonymous with redundancy, arbitrariness and inefficiency. In fact, one common satirical definition of bureaucracy is „the art of making the possible impossible.”
Less is more
In Romania, we all know how high the level of bureaucracy is, although there have been countless attempts to try to reduce it; the relationship of citizens with public institutions remains a real challenge.
One of the government’s attempts at tackling this challenge worth mentioning is the establishment of the „Paper Cutting Commission”, an initiative of de-bureaucratization of the public apparatus by constantly taking suggestions from the general public to reduce the bureaucracy’s impact on citizens and the business environment and to propose measures to simplify the administrative procedures imposed by the conduct of a business, both in terms of fees and the number of required forms.
The outcome
Great news: through the platform created for this purpose and launched in 2016, the government adopted a package of significant measures aimed at simplifying procedures and reducing citizens’ efforts to obtain documents, as well as strengthening the digitalisation process at the central public administration level.
Figures make the difference
So far have been submitted:
2686 simplification proposals for citizens
1056 simplification proposals for companies
Many of the requests concerned paying online fees for as many categories of taxes and fees as possible, reducing the number of taxes and papers, and the number of copies on the identity card, legalized copies requested by the citizen in relation to the public administration, and recognition of electronic documents with electronic signature. And that was the first film.
The second was released in October 2017 “Paper Cutting Commission 2”; screenwriter: The Platform Romania 100 and USR; casting: the citizens; development: a new platform which aims to continue the process of de-bureaucratization of public institutions in Romania and to simplify the interaction of the citizen with the state.
On the platform, notices may be submitted for unnecessary/expensive procedures. The notices are analyzed by the crew of volunteers of the Paper Cutting Commission 2 and are transformed into various actions, such as parliamentary interpellations, draft laws to be proposed by USR lawmakers, simplification proposals to the public administration, civic pressure on the institutions.
2018
Now you can ask yourself: Is this a Trilogy? When is 3 being released? So far, no release date has been announced, but the first and the second are still running out there.
On a final note, „You’ll never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” – Thomas Sowell
For more information: Emergency Ordinance no. 41/2016