Red tape is like the weather — everyone complains about it but no-one does much to fix it. Re-engineering administrative systems is complex, painstaking work that requires a lot of time, skill and patience, often for relatively small gain. And government officials are almost never held to account if their systems make life a misery for businesses and ordinary citizens.
Both national legislation and municipal bylaws require businesses, large and small, to register, apply for decisions and report on a range of activities, from occupational health and product safety to taxes, access to resources and utilities, empowerment and employment equity.
These administrative requirements enable the government to take decisions in the public interest, monitor adherence to standards and protect property rights. All too often, though, they demand too much information, impose labyrinthine procedures and end in long delays. Still, it’s often hard to figure out when the administrative costs outweigh the hoped-for benefits.
SA faces unique challenges around red tape. To start with, many administrative systems originated to serve a well-off minority. After 1994 they had to serve eight or nine times as many people. Yet most did not see a comparable increase in resourcing or, alternatively, adapt procedures to their new realities. Instead, chronic understaffing translates into bureaucratic confusion and inordinate delays.
Democracy also brought a host of new laws. Often, they established implementation systems without actually analysing either customer or government capacity. Many simply copied institutions from quite different jurisdictions, frequently in countries with far more money to spend. The result was a new layer of demands, delays, buggy websites and misunderstandings.
The most obvious reason these ills persist is that if the aims of legislation are acceptable, government officials rarely pay a price for unnecessary administrative burdens. Most legislators focus on objectives, not how to get there. From this perspective, whinging about red tape seems (and indeed often is) designed to block efforts to transform the economy and protect citizens from rogue entrepreneurs.
It's also difficult to decide where to start with administrative reform. The government itself rarely measures the cost of regulations to businesses or households. New regulations undergo some evaluation of administrative burdens, but existing procedures are grandfathered in. That makes it hard to hold officials to account for long delays or demanding unneeded or inaccessible information and documents.
Meanwhile, business complaints about red tape remain largely at the level of principle, without much agreement on practical priorities. As a result, no-one knows where reform efforts should start. In part, the difficulty is that policy engagement takes place mostly at national level, but many administrative burdens arise from municipal requirements. More fundamentally, it is usually hard to separate procedures that are needed to achieve national aims from excessive bureaucracy. No-one loves saving receipts or reporting endlessly on health and safety and BEE. But just how much of the associated administrative systems can be eliminated without endangering important programmes?
In practice, we lack reliable studies on the time and cost required for different administrative tasks. A few small private surveys have been undertaken, but they rely mostly on self-reporting, and many only cover an individual act such as procurement or taxation. As a result, they don’t help much in developing a general reform agenda.
Revising administrative systems to reduce unnecessary costs needs a clearer sense of priority areas of work, far more evidence on what is going wrong, and willingness to take on conflicts around which burdens are actually necessary. So far, initiatives to tackle red tape across government have floundered in the face of these complexities.
• Makgetla is a senior researcher with Trade & Industrial Policy Strategies.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.