A “chaotic implementation”: the Court of Auditors harshly judges the business counter

2023-12-20 21:25:26

Not a success. The Court of Auditors severely judges Wednesday the “chaotic” implementation of the electronic single window for business formalities, according to it premature, even if the situation “tends to improve”. In his response to this flash audit, the Minister of the Economy confirms that a “new emergency procedure” will be put in place in 2024 to deal with other possible dysfunctions.

As early as February, the government had already had to ask commercial court clerks to reactivate their Infogreffe platform to complete the formalities that the one-stop shop was not yet capable of ensuring. This window, resulting from the 2019 Business Pact law, replaces seven networks of formalities centers (CFE), to ensure the creation, changes of situation, or cessation of activity of companies. A single national register of businesses (RNE) has also been created.

The “significant malfunctions” that have occurred since January 1 have “heavily penalized companies”, especially since the user assistance system “proved insufficient”, notes the Court of Auditors. For her, the law “was not preceded by a sufficiently in-depth analysis of the impacts and methods of implementing the reform”: thus, “the nevertheless essential connection with the RNE had not been taken into account “.

There “remain many dysfunctions to be addressed”

Under these conditions, “from 2020, the objective of opening the one-stop shop for businesses on January 1, 2023 did not appear realistic.” However, “ministerial arbitrations have always favored respecting the initial timetable,” deplores the Court. On this point, the government retorts that “the experience of previous projects of the same nature shows that the postponement of structuring dates can deal a fatal blow to the initial ambition”.

For the Court also, “the governance and management of the project (…) proved insufficient for a project of this magnitude”, with in particular the absence of a project director. This defect began to be corrected “by integrating all the players” this summer only. From now on, “the overall situation of the one-stop shop tends to improve”, but there “remain many dysfunctions to be addressed”.

With the maintenance of the emergency procedure next year, the project would really be installed on January 1, 2025: if this deadline had been set from the outset, “given the complexity of the project, (this) would have avoided difficulties”, regrets the Court. According to the government, more than 2 million declarations were submitted to the one-stop shop in 2023.