The small‑business regulatory penalty

I. Purpose and conclusion

1. This note records an interim review of evidence concerning delays in permits and licensing processes affecting small businesses. It applies the Founders Assembly’s five-part pattern test: Volume, Frequency, Consistency, Spread and Corroboration. Its purpose is to make the present assessment and its limits visible, not to determine whether a particular public authority has complied with its duties or whether any individual application was mishandled.

2. At the cut-off date, the Red Tape Council had 113 members in 40 countries and had received 274 reports from 46 countries. The median amount reported at stake was approximately US$4,192. The evidence meets the screening thresholds for Volume, Consistency and Spread. It does not meet the threshold for Frequency, and independent Corroboration remains outstanding. The result is three tests met out of five.

3. All 274 reports are classified under the situation “permit.” This concentration is material to the review, but it does not mean the underlying reports describe an identical procedure, legal framework, authority, delay or consequence. Council records contain no verified regional breakdown, calendar-month series or external dataset matched to the reports. Those gaps are stated below rather than filled by estimates.

II. Method and thresholds

4. The review uses the Red Tape Council’s internal evidence totals as of 29 September 2026. The cut-off is applied consistently to the overall count, country coverage, situation classification, team-size profile and recent-report figure. Council records identify reports and their recorded categories; they do not, by themselves, establish that every reported event has been independently verified.

5. For this interim screen, the Council uses explicit working thresholds so that the result can be checked and repeated. These thresholds are analytical decision rules for this review, not a claim that the Assembly has adopted a general statistical standard for all councils or subjects. A threshold is counted as met only where Council records directly answer the test. A test is not counted as met where its measure is absent.

1. Volume: met at 250 or more reports in the evidence set by the cut-off date. This threshold is intended to distinguish a substantial collection of reports from a small number of isolated accounts.
2. Frequency: met at 50 or more reports received in the 30 days ending on the cut-off date. The measure is a recent-window count, not a forecast or a claim that report submissions occur at an even rate.
3. Consistency: met where at least 75 per cent of reports share a recorded situation category relevant to the issue under review. This test concerns consistency in the submitted classification; it does not establish that the reports have the same cause or legal treatment.
4. Spread: met where reports are recorded from at least 10 countries. This is a country-count threshold only. It does not establish balanced representation across regions, population groups or kinds of business.
5. Corroboration: met where the submitted accounts are supported by at least one independent source of evidence that can be compared with the reported event or process, such as a documented administrative record or a suitably matched external dataset. A general contextual publication is not, on its own, corroboration of individual reports.

6. The threshold choices are deliberately simple and auditable. They permit a preliminary decision using the fields currently collected. They are not substitutes for review of underlying records, a representative survey design or a jurisdiction-specific assessment. If the Council changes these working rules in a later review, it should identify the change and explain whether the earlier result would differ under the revised rules.

III. Findings against the five tests

A. Volume — met

7. The evidence set contains 274 reports, above the working threshold of 250. The count is therefore sufficient to meet the Volume test. It is a count of reports received, not necessarily a count of unique businesses, unique applications or distinct government decisions. Council records do not establish whether any reporters submitted more than one account or whether separate accounts concern the same process. The Council should preserve those distinctions in subsequent analysis.

B. Frequency — not met

8. There were 47 reports in the 30 days preceding the cut-off, below the threshold of 50. Frequency is therefore not met under this review’s stated rule. The result is close to the threshold but is not rounded up. The 47 figure should be read as a rolling 30-day count, not as a complete September calendar-month total. Council records contain no calendar-month sequence, so the Council cannot identify whether reporting has risen, fallen or remained stable over successive months.

C. Consistency — met

9. All 274 reports are classified as concerning a permit situation. On the recorded situation field, the common category represents 100 per cent of the evidence set and exceeds the threshold of 75 per cent. Consistency is met. This finding is limited to the category recorded in the data. The field does not distinguish permit types, stages of an application, licensing regimes, responsible bodies or the nature and length of an alleged delay. It cannot be read as proof that all reports describe one uniform administrative practice.

D. Spread — met

10. Reports were received from 46 countries, exceeding the threshold of 10. Spread is met on the defined country-count measure. Members of the Council are recorded in 40 countries; these are different measures and should not be conflated. Country coverage indicates that the issue is not confined to a single national reporting base, but the number of countries alone does not show how reports are distributed within countries or across world regions. The country totals are uneven, and eight countries account for the listed leading counts below.

E. Corroboration — not met

11. Council records include no independent administrative records, matched permit timelines or sufficiently comparable external dataset that verifies the reported events. Corroboration is therefore not met. The World Bank’s B-READY 2025 findings provide relevant international context on business regulatory frameworks and public services, but they do not validate these 274 reports or provide a matched measure of the delays described here.^[1] The Council has also undertaken activities including a Days to Open index covering 30 cities and a Permit Timer campaign. Council campaign records report no results that independently corroborate individual reports. No such result is inferred.

12. The result is three tests met and two not met. The count should not be presented as a final finding about the prevalence of permit delay in any country. It is a pattern-screening outcome based on the Council’s internal evidence at this cut-off.

IV. Data tables

A. Reports by leading country

13. The following table reports the Council’s country totals. “Other countries” is shown as a calculated remainder: 274 total reports less 152 reports across the eight listed countries. It is not a separately recorded country count. Reports came from 46 countries in total.

14. The remainder is distributed among the other 38 of the 46 reporting countries, if the eight listed countries are treated as distinct country entries. Council records do not break down the remainder by country. The table is descriptive and does not indicate the number of businesses or permits represented in each country.

B. Reports by region

15. Council records contain no regional breakdown. The table below records that limitation directly. It does not assign countries to regions or estimate report counts. The 46-country spread supports the country-count test; it cannot be converted into a regional finding without a defined classification and country-level data for the full set.

C. Reports by recorded situation

16. The Council’s situation field records one category. The total is consistent with the evidence-set count used for the test.

D. Reports by team size

17. Council records express team-size figures as percentages. They are reproduced as recorded. The percentages total 99 per cent, which is consistent with rounding; no headcounts are calculated from them.

E. Reports by month or reporting period

18. Council records include a rolling 30-day figure, not a month-by-month series. The table identifies the period that can be reported without treating a rolling window as a calendar month.

V. Limitations

19. The evidence is a collection of reports submitted to the Council. Council reports are not a representative survey of all businesses or permit applications. They therefore cannot be used to estimate the proportion of businesses affected, average waiting time, the frequency of delay in the general population, or the financial cost across an economy. The median amount at stake of approximately US$4,192 is a reported internal summary; it is not a verified estimate of total loss.

20. Council records do not include the date an application was filed, the date a decision was made, the statutory or published service time, or whether a decision was made at all. Without those fields, the Council cannot calculate actual processing durations or compare like cases. Nor can it distinguish a delay attributable to an authority from time spent by an applicant obtaining documents, responding to requests or choosing not to proceed.

21. The concentration in the “permit” category is useful for selecting a subject for further review. It is not sufficient to identify a shared administrative cause. Reports may concern different permit types and different legal systems. The present note does not name any authority, company or official as responsible for a reported delay. No conclusion is made about intent, legality or service quality in any particular case.

22. The country totals show broad reach but also unequal reporting volume. Council records include no denominator for the number of businesses, applications or Council members in each country. A higher count may reflect reporting activity, membership, exposure, access to the reporting process or other factors; the current record cannot separate these possibilities. The absence of regional totals is a further constraint on claims about geographic distribution.

23. The frequency result is especially sensitive to the chosen time window and threshold. Forty-seven reports in a rolling 30-day window falls short of the stated threshold by three. This note does not characterize the difference as statistically significant, and it does not infer a trend from a single window. A sequence of consistently defined monthly or rolling-window counts would be needed to assess change over time.

24. Finally, the screening result depends on the quality and consistency of the underlying classifications. The Council has not audited record-level data for duplicate submissions, missing fields, coding decisions or the completeness of the evidence set. This review uses the reported totals. A later review should document any deduplication or recoding and show how it affects the result.

VI. Next steps

25. The Council should continue collecting reports using a consistent minimum set of fields: country; permit or licence type; date of application; date of each material request or response; date of outcome, if any; the service time published by the responsible body, if known; and the reporter’s description of the practical consequence. These fields should be optional where a member cannot safely or accurately provide them. Collection should not require members to identify their businesses publicly.

26. To resolve the Frequency gap, the Secretariat should preserve the date of receipt for each report and publish counts for clearly specified, non-overlapping calendar months or rolling periods. Any later comparison should state the period, treatment of late submissions, and whether totals were revised. The threshold used in this note should remain visible until the Council formally changes it.

27. To strengthen Consistency without overstating uniformity, the Council should consider adding controlled subcategories for permit stage and permit type, while retaining the current broad “permit” category for comparability. Coding guidance should distinguish an application awaiting action from an application delayed by an incomplete submission, a further information request, or a process that has ended without a decision. These distinctions are proposed for evidence quality; they are not findings about the present reports.

28. To establish regional distribution, future summaries should record a defined region for each country using a published classification selected by the Council. The classification should be applied consistently and reported alongside country totals. Regional aggregation should not conceal differences between countries or imply that every country in a region is represented.

29. To address Corroboration, the Council should seek appropriately comparable public information on permit processes, published service times and administrative performance. Where a member can provide supporting material, it should be reviewed with consent and with safeguards for personal and commercially sensitive information. Aggregate comparisons should explain differences in definitions and coverage. A general international indicator may provide context, but should not be described as confirming a particular report unless the data actually support that comparison.

30. Any future public account should distinguish three statements: what members reported; what the Council’s data show; and what an independent source confirms. This distinction will protect the credibility of the evidence and ensure that the pattern test remains a screening method rather than a substitute for investigation or legal determination.

31. The Council will retain the current result as an interim assessment: Volume met; Frequency not met; Consistency met; Spread met; Corroboration not met. A subsequent review should state its cut-off date, reproduce the thresholds, identify any changes in the dataset and record whether additional evidence changes any test outcome.

Sources

1. World Bank, B-READY 2025 report and findings. The cited publication is used as contextual information only, not as corroboration of individual reports. ^[1]