GHANA NOW USING ONLINE BUSINESS REGISTRATION PLATFORM
The body responsible for registering businesses, Ghana’s Registrar General Department (RGD), has successfully implemented an online registration of businesses, issuance of certificates to commence business and the registration of marriages.
The online operations of the RGD, which faced some challenges initially when it was deployed in 2014, is now fully accessible online.
Prospective company owners can now go online and register their companies and make payments without having to visit the RGD offices as a fully functional e-payment platform which allows payments to be made in the course of online transactions have been linked to the RGD portal.
The paperless system at the Department is in line with government’s commitment to deepening the paperless regime to improve the ease of doing business in Ghana and to enhance the business competitiveness of the country.
There are also a number of functions on the new platform which are supported by a number of services on-line, which allow company searches, reservation of company names and the booking of marriage ceremonies amongst others through the e-shop information platform.
The e-shop platforms is an end-to-end registration portal developed and deployed by GCNet as part of the broad World Bank sponsored e-Gov project.
Currently the RGD systems are integrated with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) with plans far advanced to link it up with Ghana Investment Promotion Centre in the exchange of data to facilitate the ease of doing business in Ghana.
The data exchange is to encourage a paperless registration and tax regime aimed at significantly reducing administrative and operational overhead costs.
Doris Ampadu-Ameyaw, Head of IT, the Registrar General Department, hints that in line with the commitment to enhance and enrich the customer’s experience, the outfit is in the process of implementing a queue management system at the front office to improve the customer experience.
As at June 2017 over 6,855 online transactions had been conducted via the Registrar General Department’s portal.