The Omani government has reiterated the importance of a centralised single window system for registering new businesses and issuing commercial licences — a mandate currently vested with Invest-Easy, a portal set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion. The significance of a one-stop national licensing portal has been highlighted in the newly published Medium-Term Fiscal Plan (2020- 2024) formulated by the Ministry of Finance as a strategy for reining in Oman’s ballooning annual fiscal deficit and external debt.
The Ministry’s four-year blueprint for achieving fiscal sustainability underscores, among other goals, the need for enhancing Oman’s overall business environment and strengthening the Sultanate’s appeal as a destination for local and foreign investment.
Key to this objective is the importance of digitising and streamlining the approvals process to make the experience a convenient, positive and cost-competitive one for interested investors, it noted.
Stressing the importance of electronic transformation initiatives to help strengthen Oman’s business-friendly credentials, the MTFP blueprint noted: “Achieving a comprehensive electronic transformation in the procedures for registering companies and issuing commercial licences through the “Invest Easy” initiative, so that the initiative represents for the business community in the Sultanate a single access point to all electronic government services.”
To this end, much progress has been made in the integration of various government agencies — 26 entities to date — into the Invest Easy system, according to the Ministry of Finance.
They include the municipalities of Muscat, Suhar and Dhofar, which has reduced the time required to start a business from several weeks to only a number of weeks. Further, applications for labour permits for expatriate labour are being processed within three days as opposed to several weeks prior to the integration, it said.
Recent challenges posed by the pandemic and associated lockdown measures have also accentuated the need for a fully digitized, one-stop licensing portal, the Ministry pointed out. “The current pandemic has shown that the government needs to adapt and move to an e-government in order to best to continue to provide services to both citizens and residents and to ensure business conditions necessary to foster economic growth’’, it stated.
Significantly, all of the government ministries and agencies that have are stakeholders in the overall licensing process are now integrated into the Invest-Easy port.
These include the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion; Public Authority for Civil Defence and Ambulance (PACDA); Ministry of Labour; Ministry of Heritage and Tourism; Tax Authority; Environment Authority; Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology; Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Water Resources; and Public Authority for Special Economic Zones and Free Zones.
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