The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) can incorporate a business in under an hour. From anywhere in the world. No queues, no fixers—just a clean digital process that issues a Certificate of Incorporation in minutes. It is, by any measure, a genuine government success story worth celebrating.

But then the waiting begins.

From the moment the certificate is secured, an entrepreneur must navigate barangay clearances, mayor’s permits, BIR registrations, locational clearances, sanitary permits, and a host of other pre-operating compliances that can take weeks, if not months, to gather.

The SEC’s hard-won efficiency is promptly neutralized by every other agency down the line.

This is not a minor inconvenience; it is a structural failure with measurable national consequences.

As of 2024, out of 1.24-million registered business establishments in the Philippines, 99.63 percent were MSMEs. They employed some 6.3-million people—roughly 66.6 percent of the national workforce. These are not just statistics. These are families, livelihoods, and entire communities that depend on the ability of small businesses to open, operate, and grow. When we make starting a business unnecessarily hard, we make their lives unnecessarily harder.

The numbers are damning on the global stage as well. The Philippines ranked as the most challenging country in which to launch a startup in Business Name Generator’s 2023 Global Startup Index, with startup costs at 23.3 percent of GNI per capita — the highest among 50 countries. Each year, companies must make 47 tax payments, and property registration alone averages 39 days. The full process of starting a business takes over a month to complete.

Compare that to the SEC’s one-hour incorporation. The contrast demands a policy response.

Minette Navarrete — founder and managing partner of Kickstart Ventures, the Philippines’ largest technology venture capital firm and the corporate VC arm of Globe Telecom, and one of Southeast Asia’s most active voices in startup investment, a Forbes 50 Over 50 honoree with over 30 years of business experience—put it plainly: “What you really want is to make it easy for somebody to start, giving them incentives to scale.”

When someone who has watched hundreds of Philippine startups struggle to get off the ground says the policy environment is the problem, it is worth listening to.

The reform is straightforward: the SEC Certificate of Incorporation should be sufficient for a business to commence operations. The SEC already screens for fraud, illegal purposes, and regulatory non-compliance. No criminal enterprise gets an SEC certificate. That clearance should carry authority across the government.

What follows incorporation — the mayor’s permit, BIR registration, barangay clearance — should be converted from conditions precedent to running a business to compliance obligations subject to post-audit. Upon SEC incorporation, these are automatically triggered and provisionally issued. The business operates immediately. Agencies then conduct a verification within 30 to 60 days. Violations discovered post-audit carry appropriate sanctions, including suspension. This shifts the burden from blocking a business before it starts to ensuring that it stays compliant after it does.

This is how modern regulatory systems work. The difference is that progressive economies treat business registration as a right to be facilitated, not a privilege to be rationed.

The SEC has done its part. It is time for the rest of the government to close the gap.