Letter from the table: A deadline should not pretend to be a permit

Letter from the table

To the Red Tape Council,

I oppose making “silence is consent” the rule for permits. I know what a long wait costs. I also know that an unanswered application is not the same thing as a checked application, and the difference matters to the person applying and to everyone who shares the building, street and neighborhood.

On 9 April 2026, I submitted a licensing request for a new business address in São Paulo through the VRE|REDESIM process. The city’s licensing route depends on the activity and the address: zoning and the activity’s risk classification help determine what licensing steps apply. I checked the address and followed the process shown for my case. I am not writing to claim that every business needs the same permit, or that every application should be approved.

On 15 April, the portal showed that a municipal licensing step was still pending. I checked the application details, gathered the documents the process requested and followed up through the available channel. I kept a record of the submission and the status. By 6 May, I still had no decision I could act on. The problem was not that I expected an instant answer. It was that I could not plan around an answer date.

I did not begin operating from the new address while the licensing question remained unresolved. Instead, I continued working from a smaller space where I could already operate, while paying to keep the new premises available. In April, rent on the new space was R$2,800. I paid R$640 for

electrical work that had to be completed before the premises could be used, and R$390 for temporary storage while I waited. Those amounts did not buy me a faster answer. They bought time, and even that time was limited.

So I changed how I ran the business. I postponed moving equipment, kept essential work at the existing space and delayed commitments that depended on having the new address ready. I stopped treating the move-in date as a date and started treating it as a possibility. That protected me from operating before I had the required clearance, but it also meant paying for a space I could not use as planned. A small business cannot absorb uncertainty in the same way a large organization can. A few weeks of duplicated costs can force decisions that are hard to reverse.

I support the Red Tape Council’s work on measuring permit times, publishing service standards and testing the impact of new rules on small businesses. A one-stop process can help if it gives applicants a clear route and does not simply move the same unanswered question from one screen to another. Applicants should be able to see what has been received, what remains to be checked, who is responsible for the next step, and when to expect an update. If a clock is paused because the applicant must provide something, that pause should be visible and explained.

But I oppose an automatic approval created by silence. A permit decision can involve more than paperwork. The activity, address and conditions at a premises matter. If an authority has not completed a check, declaring the application approved does not complete that check. It could expose a business owner to a later enforcement problem, put neighbors or customers at risk, or create different expectations for applicants depending on how well they understand the rules. The applicant should not have to guess whether silence means “approved,” “not yet reviewed,” or “something has gone wrong.”

There is a better way to make a deadline matter. Set a published service time for each step, show applicants the status and the reason for any hold, and provide a named route for escalation when the service time expires. If

the authority misses its deadline, it should have to explain the delay and give a firm next date. Where the law allows a low-risk activity to proceed through a notification or simplified route, make that route explicit before the applicant commits money. Where approval is genuinely required, do not replace it with an assumption.