Spain is the country in which small businesses must spend the most hours dealing with bureaucracy. This is the takeaway from a new international comparison, Bureaucracy Index 2019, for which several European think tanks, including Civismo, calculated the time required to carry out various procedures involved in the operation of a business.
Thus, in the case of Spain, the total time amounts to 363 hours needed to deal with paperwork related to hiring and firing of staff, registration and management of working times, payment of taxes and contributions by employees, implementation of legal changes, compilation of mandatory statistical reports, waste management, certifications, or occupational risk prevention tasks, among other activities.
The Index, which also covers the cases of Slovakia (221 hours), Czech Republic (226) and Lithuania (244), after studying the operation of a model company with four employees over a year, found a gap between labor policies, with their consequent bureaucratic obligations, and the day-to-day life of these small companies. This burden, translated into time spent, is detrimental to the productivity and efficiency necessary for economic growth.
Spain is the country of the sample that spends more time on paperwork linked to the management of the personnel and the operation of the company, while, with just six hours per year, it is the one that has less time to spend on other bureaucratic matters related to legal, statistical or certification issues.
The activities that consume the most hours, with a total of almost 259, are those of business operations, which include fiscal administration, waste management, vehicles, and the prevention of occupational hazards. On the other hand, the obligations that have to do with human resources, namely, payment of salaries, taxes and contributions, hiring and firing, and registration of work times, involve almost 98 hours for paperwork.
On September 29, International Bureaucracy Day is celebrated every year, and initiatives such as this Index aim to make lawmakers aware of the excessive burden imposed on businessmen, and the need to lighten it so that they can devote their time to tasks that result in greater economic and social productivity.
