Bawumia launches e-certificate to complete online business registration

Vice president Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has launched the E-certificate component which completes the registrar general department’s business automation project which now allows for the registration of businesses to be done fully online.

Delivering his speech in Accra on Thursday, the Vice-President, commended the Registrar-General, Jemima Oware, and members of her team for the innovation.

“The launch of the innovation shows the culmination of hard work to reform and enhance the department’s service delivery in line with the President’s vision to make Ghana the most business-friendly nation in Africa,” he said.

With the completion of the automation project, business registration, including payments and receiving of commencement and incorporation certificates, could be done completely online from any geographical location.

The process is expected to take a day or two instead of the usual two weeks or more, as was the case with the manual system.

Online registration is expected to completely take over the manual registration of businesses by the close of 2018.

The addition, which is expected to enhance service delivery, would be a shift from the old system where a registrant had to go to the offices of the department to pick up the certificates after the online registration process.

Dr Bawumia expressed optimism that once the new Company’s Act, which was currently before Parliament was passed into law, “which is expected to be soon,” commencement certificate would no longer be a requirement to start a business, in addition to the incorporation certificate.

“We would work with Parliament to facilitate the speedy passage of the Act,” he added.

The Vice-President said although registration was the first step to starting a business, in time past, it took three months to do a name authentication or search before registration which, he said, was not conducive for economic development.

“What we are witnessing today is an example of Public Private Partnership with support from development partners, such as the World Bank with the aim of re-engineering the business processes of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Registrar General’s Department,” he said.

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