Centre to develop a single e-compliance window soon to promote ease of doing business

The central government has been planning to develop a single e-compliance window for India Inc. This new framework will enable the companies to comply with the different regulatory requirements at one go.

As per the senior government official, the idea is to reduce the compliance burden. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs has also initiated discussions with various regulators including RBI, SEBI, and the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, to create a single platform with common data sources.

At present, companies in India have to make multiple filings, and different regulators have different formats and requirements for the submission of data. With a common platform, companies will be able to file their data in one place while regulators will get their data from one source.

What is the objective of a single e-compliance window?

The objective behind proposing the single e- compliance platform is to integrate databases of the Corporate Affairs Ministry and other bodies for bringing down the duplication in the filing. The move will further help in the ease of doing business.

Pavan Vijay, Founder of Business Advisory from Corporate Professionals explained that there should be a single repository from which all the regulators can pull the required data. Possibly, some regulators may require additional information for which they can request separately, but they will be able to get 80-90% of their requirements from this single repository.

He further added that this will also reduce the scope to manipulate information that is being sent to different regulators in order to comply with different regulations or to avoid taxes.

MCA’s plan to integrate other platforms:

Ministry of Corporate Affairs has now been planning to integrate other platforms in order to ensure that the companies are saved from the task of multiple filings with multiple bodies including the regulators.

Within the plan, Trade Receivables Discounting System (Treds) for the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is also being integrated. The ministry has also been working on version three of MCA-21 which will further simplify user-interface, which is likely to roll out from September 2021.

The government’s plan to reduce the compliance burden in all the areas as part of the ease of doing initiative and to make India attractive to foreign investors.

Ease of doing business is a key priority for government and various steps are in line which will help the country break into the top 50 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index.