Use Readable text for larger type, or zoom in on the pages.
Red Tape Council
Summary record of the seventh session of the Red Tape Council
Sittings: Asia-Pacific, 06:00 UTC; Europe/Africa/Americas, 16:00 UTC
Chair: Edna Assunção, Chair of the Red Tape Council, São Paulo, Brazil
Attendance: The Council had 94 members from 35 countries. The Council's records do not state a separate headcount for either sitting or a combined count of participants present.
Agenda: (a) review of the RT-001 evidence base; (b) member accounts of permits, licensing and administrative processes; (c) the five-part pattern test; (d) development of evidence tools, including Days to Open and the Permit Timer; (e) decisions and follow-up work.
Summary of proceedings
The seventh session of the Red Tape Council was held in two Open Table sittings on 22 August 2026, at 06:00 UTC and 16:00 UTC. The sittings were convened under the Rules of Procedure of the Founders Assembly. The Chair, Edna Assunção, presided. The record combines the matters considered in both sittings and does not attribute a contribution to one sitting unless the record establishes that distinction.
The Chair opened the session by recalling that the Council’s work concerned patterns in administrative practices affecting small businesses, rather than the conduct of any single company or public body. She noted that the Council was collecting reports and testing whether the reported experience met the five-part pattern test: Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration. The session was an evidence and work-planning meeting. No draft standard was before the Council, and no adoption ballot was held.
The Chair placed the evidence base in context. As of 22 August, the Red Tape Council had 94 members from 35 countries and had received 217 reports from 44 countries. The median amount at stake reported to the Council was approximately US$4,240. The Council’s records classified the 217 reports as concerning permits. The Chair cautioned that report counts were not, by themselves, proof of a common pattern and should not be treated as a representative survey of all small businesses.
In reviewing the Council’s current status, the Chair stated that RT-001 had not yet passed the five-part pattern test. The Council was therefore continuing to examine the reports and identify what further corroboration would be needed. She distinguished between the proposed policy ask and an adopted Council position: the working ask was that rules affecting businesses include a small-business impact test, that processes be available through a one-stop digital route, that service times be published, and that permits have a clear decision deadline, including consideration of a silence-is-consent approach. These elements remained under examination.
Ms. Lúcia Ferreira, São Paulo, Brazil, described the difficulty of estimating when a permit process would finish when an applicant could not find a public service-time commitment. She said that uncertainty made it harder to plan expenditure and coordinate the opening of a premises. She recommended that the Council record the date an application was submitted, the date a complete file was acknowledged, and the date a decision was received as separate points. She stressed that a measured interval would be more useful if the record also showed whether the application had been returned for additional information.
Mr. Arjun Mehta, Ahmedabad, India, reported that applicants could face repeated requests to provide information already supplied through another step in a process. He considered that duplication distinct from the time taken to reach a decision. He proposed that evidence forms ask whether a request was repeated, whether the applicant was told why it was needed, and whether the request paused the stated processing period. The Council agreed that these details could help it distinguish a long but transparent process from one in which requirements or timelines were unclear.
Ms. Camila Nascimento, Recife, Brazil, described uncertainty about which office or level of administration was responsible for answering a permit question. She said that a business owner could lose time seeking clarification without knowing whether the inquiry had reached the authority able to decide the application. She recommended that the Council record the number of hand-offs reported and whether a named contact or case reference was provided. Her contribution was noted as evidence about navigation and accountability, not as a finding that every multi-office process produced the same result.
Mr. Daniel Okafor, Lagos, Nigeria, addressed the consequences of an unanswered application. He said that an applicant needed to know whether silence meant that the file remained under review, that more material was required, or that the request had been refused. He supported examining a defined deadline for a decision, while cautioning that any silence-is-consent proposal would need careful consideration of public safety, the type of permit, and the safeguards available to applicants and affected parties. He asked that the Council document both the delay and the practical status communicated to the applicant.
Ms. Amina Yusuf, Abuja, Nigeria, spoke about the difference between a published procedure and the steps an applicant understood to be necessary in practice. She recommended that the evidence collection ask whether the process and its requirements were available before an application began, and whether the applicant could identify a single authoritative source for them. She also proposed capturing whether applicants were required to make in-person visits, without presuming that a digital process would be suitable in every circumstance.
Mr. Michael Clarke, Toronto, Canada, supported using a common set of fields for permit-related reports. He said that a consistent record would make comparisons more meaningful and could reduce the risk of treating different kinds of permit as equivalent. He proposed recording the general permit category, the stage at which delay or confusion occurred, and whether the applicant had received a written explanation. He further recommended that personal details not needed for pattern analysis be excluded from public summaries.
Ms. Chiara Bianchi, Milan, Italy, raised the importance of separating the applicant’s estimate of a delay from a delay established by dated records. She suggested that the Council invite members to provide documents or contemporaneous notes where they were able to do so, while allowing reports without documentary material to remain part of the evidence base. She emphasized that corroboration should strengthen the assessment without making participation impossible for a member who did not retain every record.
Mr. Kwame Mensah, Accra, Ghana, proposed that the Council examine whether service times, where stated, were easy to locate and expressed in a form an applicant could understand. He suggested that the evidence form distinguish between a published target, an estimated processing time, and a binding deadline. He also urged the Council to record whether an authority explained how the clock was calculated, including any pauses while further information was requested.
Ms. Nia Williams, Kingston, Jamaica, recommended that the Council consider the effect of unresolved permit applications on small teams with limited capacity to follow up. She asked that members be invited to describe the practical consequence in general terms, such as postponed work or additional time spent seeking an update, without requiring them to disclose the identity of their business. The Chair confirmed that members were not required to name their businesses in Council evidence.
In discussing the five-part test, the Council reviewed the distinction between Volume and Frequency. Members considered that the existing report total showed the scale of evidence received but did not establish how often a particular experience occurred across all applicants. For the next review, members proposed grouping reports by identifiable process features rather than relying on a single broad label. The grouping should make clear when two reports concern different permit types or different stages of an application.
On Consistency, members considered whether similar reports described a recurring practice, such as unclear timelines, repeated information requests or difficulty identifying the responsible office. They agreed that the evidence note should preserve differences between accounts and should not convert a shared theme into a claim that all authorities or all permits operate in the same way. Members also asked that the Council record when a process appeared to work as described, as such evidence could help define the limits of a proposed finding.
On Spread, members noted that the Council had received reports from 44 countries, while its membership came from 35 countries. They agreed that country coverage alone would not establish that the same practice existed across jurisdictions. Further analysis should identify the location and type of process in each report and should describe the geographical reach of the evidence with appropriate qualifications. The Council would not infer national prevalence from the number of reports received from an individual country.
On Corroboration, members considered several possible forms of support, including dated application records, published service information, written requests for additional material, and an applicant’s record of contact with the relevant office. The Council did not require any one form of evidence for a report to be retained. Members agreed that the analysis should distinguish first-hand reports from material that independently confirms a process or timeline, and should avoid publishing personal or commercially sensitive details.
The Council reviewed the proposed Days to Open index and Permit Timer as evidence-gathering campaigns. Members considered that Days to Open could help document the elapsed time between relevant milestones in an opening process, while the Permit Timer could help collect a more detailed account of an individual permit sequence. They agreed that the tools should explain what dates to enter, how to handle incomplete or paused applications, and how to report a process that ended without a decision. The tools were not presented as a ranking of named public authorities.
The Chair referred to the World Bank’s B-READY 2025 findings as relevant external context. That report covered 101 economies; its average business-readiness result was approximately 60 per cent, and public-services scores were approximately 23 per cent below regulatory-framework scores.1 The Council noted that these findings concerned a broader assessment and did not verify the individual member reports before it. Members agreed that any later reference to the findings should preserve that distinction.
Members considered the proposed small-business impact test. They supported examining whether a new rule or administrative change could impose disproportionate time, information or compliance demands on smaller businesses. They did not settle a single method or threshold for such a test. The Council agreed that further work should identify possible questions for a test, who would be expected to apply it, and how an assessment could be made visible to affected businesses.
On the one-stop digital process proposal, members supported examining whether an applicant could find the requirements, submit information, monitor progress and receive a decision through a coherent route. They cautioned that a single digital entry point would not, by itself, resolve unclear requirements, repeated requests or a lack of response. The evidence review should therefore assess the function of a process rather than treat digitization alone as proof of improvement.
On published service times and decision deadlines, members agreed to gather cases of the language used by public bodies and the actual milestones reported by applicants. The Council would examine whether stated times were targets or commitments, how applicants were notified of pauses, and what route existed for an applicant to request an update. Members did not decide at this session that a particular deadline was suitable for every permit category.
After discussion, the Council agreed that the current work should remain at the evidence and pattern-testing stage. It did not declare that RT-001 had passed any additional part of the test, adopt the proposed Small Business Impact Standard, or endorse a final form of silence-is-consent rule. The next step would be a better-structured review of the reports already received and a further collection of comparable, dated evidence.
The Council also agreed that public-facing summaries should use general descriptions of administrative practices and should not identify a member’s business. Reports would continue to be handled in accordance with the Assembly’s procedures. If cases were used in later Council material, they should be presented without details that could identify a member unless that member had expressly chosen a public seat.
The Chair closed the discussion by thanking members for their contributions. She stated that the Council’s task was to make the burden legible and testable: to describe the administrative step, identify what happened and when, and establish whether comparable experiences formed a sufficiently supported pattern. She confirmed that the Council would return to the evidence before deciding whether a draft fix was warranted.
Decisions and action items
Evidence coding. The Council agreed to refine the internal coding of permit reports to distinguish permit category, process stage, repeated requests, service-time information, hand-offs, and outcome. Owner: Red Tape Council evidence group. The coding proposal is to be circulated for member review before it is used for a substantive pattern finding.
Evidence form. The Council agreed to prepare additions to the reporting form covering submission and acknowledgement dates, requests for further information, pauses in processing, written explanations and final outcomes. Owner: Edna Assunção, with members who offered to review the form. The additions are to preserve the option to submit a report without documentary attachments.
Days to Open and Permit Timer. The Council agreed to prepare plain-language instructions for both tools, including guidance on incomplete applications and processes that end without a decision. Owner: Red Tape Council campaign team. The tools are to collect evidence about process stages and time, not to rank named authorities.
Five-part test. The Council agreed to continue examining RT-001 against Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration, and to state explicitly where evidence is limited. Owner: Red Tape Council evidence group, reporting to the Chair. No conclusion that the pattern test had been passed was recorded at this session.
Small-business impact test. Members who volunteered to contribute will prepare possible questions for an impact assessment and identify issues requiring further consideration, including scope, responsibility and publication. Owner: participating Council members, coordinated by the Chair. This work is exploratory and does not constitute a draft standard.
Public summaries and privacy. The Council agreed to use non-identifying descriptions of member experiences and to avoid naming members’ businesses. Owner: the Chair and the Secretariat when preparing Council materials. Any use of an identifiable member account requires that member’s choice to take a public seat.
Next session
The next Red Tape Council Open Table session was scheduled for 19 September 2026, with sittings at 06:00 UTC for Asia-Pacific and 16:00 UTC for Europe/Africa/Americas. The proposed focus was review of the revised evidence fields and progress on the RT-001 pattern test. The Council would determine at that session whether the evidence justified further work toward a draft fix.
Edna AssunçãoChair, Red Tape CouncilSão Paulo, Brazil
This document has no standing until adopted under the Founders Charter. Reseated Councils is not affiliated with the United Nations.