Business News of Wednesday, 22 June 2016
Source: Eyeonpoint
The Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade, Industry and Tourism has commended West Blue Consulting Limited, the IT Company providing technical assistance to the Customs Division of the Ghana Revenue Authority for the National Single Window project.
The committee members who paid a working visit to the offices of West Blue to familiarize themselves with their operations said they were very impressed about the successes of the national single window project so far.
Briefing the committee members about their activities, the CEO of West Blue consulting limited, Valentina Mintah said hitherto importers of a commodity like rice, were required to fill 44 documents comprising regulatory registrations, commercial related documents, regulatory required documents and transport required documents but the trend no longer exists as a result of the National Single Window project.
“Just to get all those 44 documents through the 23 actors and because we are not coordinated and entities are waiting for someone to finish their process before they start it becomes sequential instead of being coordinated and in parallel. If you look at it from a single window environment we can have a central system where the trader presents his or her information to this main central repository and the three agencies can feed that,” she said.
The Chairman of the Trade, Industry and Tourism committee of Parliament, George Aboagye commended West Blue for facilitating trade in the country and assured traders that there will minimized cost of doing business in the country.
“I am saying this to encourage you that you are doing a very important exercise that will put the port administration, movement of goods and for Customs to be efficient. When there is one channel through which revenue will be collected, through which transaction of trade would be undertaken then it makes life very easy both for government and the revenue generation agencies and also for the traders and other business entities,” he noted.
The Ranking Member for the committee, Prof Djan Baffour was optimistic the activities of West Blue would reduce the challenges associated with trade in the country.
“Initially I wasn’t really sure what the role of West Blue will be, because I thought it was going to take over the role of the Destination Inspection Companies but their activity is just one activity out of a series of activities so I didn’t know they were trying to put all the various activities in terms of trade facilitation together under one common platform so I think that one can reduce a lot of problems associated with trade,” he stated