The national law proposal to eliminate bureaucratic procedures (LNETB), which promises to simplify processes and digitize up to 80% of government procedures, could affect transparency and regulatory quality, compromising the legal certainty of citizens and companies, according to the Mexico Evalua and Coparmex organization.
“While both organizations recognize the government’s effort to simplify administrative processes, they warn that, if their design is not improved, the initiative could compromise transparency, regulatory quality and legal certainty of citizens and companies,” they said in a joint statement.
They pointed out that in 2023 the MSMEs invested an average of 500 hours per year in process, of which only 16.2% were digital.
They pointed out that the proposal of law, whose vote is scheduled in an extraordinary period and without an open parliament, proposes to reduce the management times and digitize 80% of the procedures through the unique digital identity “MX key”.
They added that the initiative also proposes to eliminate duplicities, homologate processes, provide a file to each citizen and grant legal validity to digital documents.
However, experts in regulatory improvement and digitalization warn that, without first redesigning existing procedures, digitalization could perpetuate inefficient or even harmful processes.
Mariana Campos, director of Mexico Evalúa, who collaborated in the SAT digitalization process, shared the main learning of that experience: “You cannot digitize on top of processes or procedures that are not well established, which are redundant or have vices.”
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The statement stressed that one of the main concerns is that the proposal includes too many exceptions to the application of regulatory impact analysis, a key mechanism to evaluate the relevance of new standards.
“Even in sensitive issues such as expropriation, taxation or security, so that in practice it is as if it were eliminated,” he said.
Organizations questioned the elimination of local councils, the concentration of functions in a single federal unit and the absence of accountability mechanisms.
In inclusion issues, the project does not adequately consider the digital lag of municipalities or the risks of exclusion of vulnerable groups.
To this is added the lack of legal guarantees in terms of cybersecurity, despite the fact that Mexico concentrates 55% of cyber attacks in Latin America, according to Sissi de la Peña, of the Mexican Academy of Cybersecurity.
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Juan de Dios Barba, president of the Competitiveness Commission and Regulatory Improvement of Coparmex., Recalled that “150 thousand regulations nationwide and more than 300 thousand procedures in the three levels of government, is a huge challenge; the best way to implement a simplification process is to do it with the user”.
Among the recommendations raised by Mexico evaluates and Coparmex are: redesign procedures before digitizing them, investing in digital infrastructure and literacy, limiting exceptions to regulatory impact analysis and guaranteeing citizen participation in the design of standards.
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