LITHUANIAN GOVERNMENT STARTS REFORMS IN THE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR BUSINESS ENTERPRISES

ECOVIS Miskinis, Kvainauskas ir partneriai advokatu kontora

The Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Lithuania announced that the World Bank, in its research paper “Doing Business 2010” released on June 1, 2009, ranked Lithuania in 26th place out of a total 183 countries for the difficulties in procedures of starting a business, in employing of workers, protecting investors and so on.
The Lithuanian government declared its goal to improve the business environment and to be ranked amongst the top 15 economies in the World Bank Doing Business ratings.
For the implementation of these objectives, the government has created the so-called “Sunset committee,” with the main objective to eliminate the non-essential load of regulation for business and to create the means that would help the enterprises to remain competitive.
According to the data from the government, today there are more than 150 institutions which are intended to control legal entities in Lithuania. Research shows that functions of these institutions are often duplicated, and that they control non-essential issues. Such methods of control make for vast difficulties for business enterprises and open up possibilities for corruption.
The main purpose of this reform of ‘control’ institutions is to separate the punitive functions from the functions of inspection and to create a more qualified, clearer and more effective control system of business enterprises.
The government has plans to divide all control institutions into 8 main groups of: environment, competition and risk control, financial markets, culture and education, taxes, customs and accountancy, society and personal health, safety of products and processes. Then, all functions of such institutions falling into one group will be sorted and clarified, eliminating the duplicated and unnecessary ones. The last step will be the creation of a unified and optimized control system of business enterprises.
Together with the recent changes in the Law on Companies, which ease the publication of notifications by companies, this makes the meeting of founders of the company non-essential, clarifies the dismissal of a manager of the company, entrenches the requirement to keep a written list of shareholders of the company and to present it to the Register of legal entities, eases the procedure of transfer of shares, shortens incorporation procedures of small and medium‑sized single-individual-owned business by half, and several others – these improvements should turn to tangible results not only in surveys and rankings but also in a real easement of doing business in Lithuania.
The most appropriate legal form for doing business in Lithuania that suits individual needs can be chosen after considering responsibility, expediency, taxation, management issues and of course after consulting professionals.