Etap Lighting, a company that makes lighting installations, installed a candy machine for its staff some time ago. You can pay with a card or smartphone. An administrative ordeal began for Etap. Because digital payments are involved, the Ubo register must be completed.
Ubo stands for ‘ultimate beneficial owners’ or ‘ultimate beneficiaries’, and fits within the context of the fight against terrorism and money laundering. The fact that this complicated register is necessary for a vending machine with sweets is, for Christ’l Joris, chairman of Etap, the height of Kafkaesque legislation. “In my company we spend more and more time completing documents. That’s time that my people can’t spend on more interesting tasks. Because it is all so complicated, we also have to call on expensive, specialized lawyers and consultants,” Joris criticizes. “Plus, you get the awful feeling that something might be wrong somewhere.”
She gave the example at a press conference about the increasing administrative burden for companies of the employers’ organization VBO. “After several years with fewer redundant rules, the transition to more rules started in 2018. According to the Planning Bureau, which measures the administrative pressure, this cost companies 5 billion euros in 2020 and 6 billion euros in 2022. Reducing the administrative burden is the cheapest method to increase our competitiveness,” says Pieter Timmermans, CEO of the VBO. The FEB listed fifteen measures that, according to the organization, could halve administrative costs.
Double work
The biggest complaint is the double work. The UBO directive in particular is a bit of a nightmare for SMEs – which often do not have in-house lawyers. Moreover, they must enter that information twice: once in a federal database, and often again for their banking institutions. “That’s double work. Why don’t we just give the banks direct access to that database? You can also ask the question here whether those rules are proportional,” says Edward Roosens, chief economist at the VBO.
Another example is the extract from the criminal record that directors of a company must regularly submit. Can’t the government find that out from its own database? According to the VBO, it is a common phenomenon: the government requests data that it already has.
Companies also point to Europe as a driver of additional administrative burden. Sustainability reporting saddles them with extra work. “That is not a problem for very large firms, they have people for that. The problem is that they also need sustainability data from their suppliers, such as CO₂ emissions. These are often smaller companies for which it is much more difficult to collect such data. In addition, the method of requesting information is not very standardized and centralized, which means that SMEs have to complete several long questionnaires and therefore lose a lot of time,” says Timmermans.
In addition to the fifteen procedures for administrative simplification, Timmermans advocates the appointment of a “Kafka government commissioner” who reports directly to the Prime Minister. They can then sound the alarm every time new legislation is approved that unnecessarily increases the regulatory burden.
Tags: VBO Kafka government commissioner Administrative burden increasing
