ISLAMABAD - The World Bank has shortlisted 12 Pakistani cities to carry out a comparative study for its 'Doing Business 2010 Report aimed at recommending reforms in local regulatory regime to facilitate business registrations and operations. This transpired from a detailed discussion with Dana Omroan of the World Banks Doing Business Project in New York via a conference call. According to Omroan, the Doing Business project of the World Bank has shown some tremendous success during the last year. She said during May 2008 to June 2009 some 131 developing countries carried out 287 reforms. According to the World Bank official, Pakistan has topped as the best performer in the Doing Business project during the last year. Pakistan has overtaken the top performer position from Maldives. Financial crisis means the job crisis, and the Doing Business project has experienced that small and medium size as well as start-up businesses were best for job creations, she observed. Therefore, it has also come to fore that the countries that reformed regulations and taxations towards making the doing business easy had the potential to recover fast from the crisis. To a question she said, we understand that making a sub-national report on doing business in Pakistan is a challenging task but our people are already out there collecting information from the grass root level. She hoped that the sub-national study on Doing Business in Pakistan comparing different cities with one another would be near finalization by March or April 2010. We are focused on benchmarking best regulatory process and practices in the world and suggesting reforms for making local business regulations simpler and easier, she added. To a question on state of security in Pakistan, she said, it was not in the scope of their project or even ongoing studies in all the respective developing countries. She said the Doing Business Project of the World Bank was up for minimizing local differences of legislations related to business registrations and afterward operations. To a question, she said, even if there are number of agencies involved at various levels regarding the business regulations as well as tax matters as was the case in Pakistan, it seldom bars countries from reforming. She told The Nation that the project has recently completed a similar sub-national study in India where it compared three Southern cities of the neighboring country to Pakistan. The World Banks sub-national study on cities would include Karachi, Hyderabad, Multan, Lahore, Faisalabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Quetta, Peshawar, and some others. According to Omroan, the Doing Business studies of the World Bank project were a high value source of country marketing. Although our studies highlight local issues and institutions needing reforms, international investors do look at them as an authentic source for doing business researches, she added. According the Doing Business project official, Pakistan simplified business start up by taking up the following reform measures during the last year. To start with it implemented an e-Services project of the SECP that is developed to establish and implement on-line automated collection, acceptance and forwarding of submissions by companies who are required by law to file forms and documents with the SECP. Second notable reform the government of Pakistan carried out by reducing the time to register for sales tax where the time was reduced from 12 to 1 day. The facility of electronic filing of the Sales Tax return has also been made available, amongst others, to private and public limited companies. From July 1 2008, electronic filing has been made mandatory for all categories of taxpayers. The procedure for e filing has been laid down in the Sales Tax General Order No.4/2007. A registered person shall obtain a unique identifier, PIN code and a secure password by visiting the Federal Board of Revenues (FBRs) web portal at e.fbr.gov.pk. Such person can then file the return by selecting declaration sales tax from the web portal. The return data shall be filled in a web form and directly transferred to the FBRs server. Pakistan has also rationalized the fees by reducing the registration cost to encourage on-line registration by PKR 2080. The Doing Business was also made easy through simplification of the registration process in June 2008 by removing the requirement to make declaration of Compliance on a stamp paper and made it on Form 1. Last but not the least, the regulatory regime was also reformed by abolishing the seal and replaced it with a digital signature that is obtained from the National Institutional Facilitation Technologies (NIFT). The NIFT serves as the witness of all digitally signed documentation made through e Service. This has resulted in a reduction of 4 days, 1 procedure and the cost was halved.