A number of people have complained that inspection visits are a nice way to ask for “bribery money” from an enterprise. What’s your point of view on such charges?

In my opinion, an important reason is that we lack a guiding principle for conducting inspection visits on enterprises; i.e. the inspection mechanism and sanction policy on an inspection mission.

Under our current law, each enterprise will only be subjected to an inspection visit from an authorized agency.

However, in our country, there has not been any official legal document regulating how many official appraisal visits to an enterprise or an office can be conducted. That’s why in a year, one enterprise may receive several visits by different agencies, like the fire brigade, police, tax agent or others.

In such situation, the enterprise’s owner cannot do any thing other than welcome the appraisers. In my opinion, such appraisal visits could be described as “acts of terror” against the enterprises!

So, as far as I’m concerned, government agencies should provide enterprises with better conditions to promote their business and production, not to prevent them from development.

In other words, we should strictly implement the government’s policy on administrative reform to cut down the red tape enabling enterprises to do their business.

Have you experienced other red-tape measures that enterprises have to grin and bear?

A very common red-tape measure that the enterprises are often asked to do is to contribute their money to something for the public interest – called “socialisation” in Việt Nam.

When an enterprise is asked to contribute a sum of money to build a public project in a locality, it is unlikely the enterprise would refuse the request.

My argument here is that if a public project is authentically needed by people in a locality – for example people living in flooded areas or more recently, people are affected by the mass fish deaths in central Việt Nam, the enterprises are willingly offering help to these people. But in a lot of cases, beneficiaries of the enterprises’ contributions are only small groups of people!

Don’t you think that in real life, appraisal missions conducted by specialized government agencies to an enterprise have helped them improve their responsibility towards their employees and the surrounding community?

No, I don’t think so. The act is to indulge in sophism.

There are only a small number of enterprises breaching the law.

We’re now living in a society ruled by law. So, management agencies should be able to make a black list of enterprises that are likely to violate the Law on Enterprises or other Vietnamese legal documents.

Of course, for enterprises in the black list, we have to adopt a “special treatment” toward them to make them become “law obedient” enterprises.

In your opinion, how many appraisal missions an enterprise should receive in a year?

Each enterprise should be checked just once in a year. Mission members should come from various agencies, including fire fighters, medical doctors or from other occupations depending on the specialisation of that enterprise. Of course, the mission must get permission from authorised people.

This is one of the measures helping the enterprise focus their efforts on production and improving the livelihood of their workers so as to contribute more to the national budget. — VNS