The government is set to integrate the Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office (CAIPO) into a promised agency called Business Barbados, following years of complaints about slow service and mounting backlogs, Minister of Energy and Business Development, Senator Lisa Cummins told the Senate on Friday.
CAIPO will be “subsumed within this entity called Business Barbados, and the functions of Business Barbados will be far more expansive than those that currently exist under the Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office,” Senator Cummins said during debate on the legislation governing the new agency, the Business Barbados Bill.
“The functions of Business Barbados will be far more expansive than those that currently exist under the Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office.”
The minister gave an assurance that no jobs would be lost in the transition from CAIPO to Business Barbados, with staffing levels expected to double over the next few years to meet business community needs.
She described widespread frustration among business leaders here and abroad who have long lamented the slow and often poor service they received from CAIPO.
“Lawyers, corporate trust service providers [and] accountants [were] raising issues with having to deal with CAIPO. ‘I need to register a business and it takes too long’, ‘I need to be able to issue and submit a change in director’s form. I can do this in Turks and Caicos in an hour, and in Barbados it’s taking me months’. These are the calls that I received in the first couple of days of transferring into this ministry,” she said.
“There is not a business person in this country that has not had a negative experience with CAIPO.”
Senator Cummins explained that CAIPO had been overwhelmed since 2013 by new responsibilities, including Financial Action Taskforce obligations coming as a result of anti-money laundering requirements and Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) obligations coming as a consequence of international tax obligations.
To address these challenges, the new entity will include a Business Advisory Support Service “that allows small businesses to have the benefit of a person who is there, to deal with their queries, to answer questions, to guide them, and to ensure that they are able to navigate their way through what we know to be a complicated system”, Senator Cummins said. Additionally, “there now will be a standalone intellectual property agency housed within Business Barbados that would be focused exclusively on matters relating to intellectual property”.
Entrepreneur and opposition lawmaker Senator Ryan Walters welcomed the new agency but raised concerns about costs: “A small business person finds great difficulty in paying the fees to incorporate their business, so are these moves going to increase the cost of business to our small business community?”
Independent Senator Andrew Mallalieu, a real estate executive, queried why the Auditor General would be in charge of auditing Business Barbados, under the new legislation, given that it is well known there is a lack of resources and manpower in that department.
“It is a matter of record that has been discussed in this chamber before – that the Auditor General is swamped in the duties that they have and are short on resources. I believe that the audit for financial purposes could have been separate from the requirements under the Public Finance Act,” he said.
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