State moves
to streamline
biz registration

Time is money, and the state government says it wants to help local entrepreneurs save both through a new online business-registration system launched yesterday.

The system, called Hawaii Business Express, allows people to complete the steps required to register a business entirely online, sparing them separate trips to the four different government agencies usually involved in the process.

"It just didn't make sense putting people through that. So we've created a one-stop shop where all of that is brought together," says Mark Recktenwald, director of the state's Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs.

Typically, entrepreneurs in Hawaii register their business or trade name with the DCCA and apply for a general excise tax license from the Taxation Department, an unemployment insurance identification number from the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations and another identification number from the Internal Revenue Service.

The new state Web site, at www.ehawaii.gov/bizex, lets registrants take care of all those tasks through an easily navigated series of steps.

The site is likely to draw its share of hits: About 2,000 new businesses are formed each month in Hawaii, Recktenwald said. The DCCA has offered an online avenue for its portion of the registration process for about two and half years, and more than half of its new business registrations are received online.

The tax and labor departments previously did not offer online processing of applications, but their computer systems were brought up to speed specifically for the effort, Recktenwald said. The endeavor took about a year to complete.

The site also offers the same 25 percent discounts on fees previously extended by the DCCA to online registrants. Those fees can range from around $50 for a sole proprietorship to $100 for a corporation.

The state currently offers online applications and processing for about 30 business-related permits and other documents, said Dan Morrison, general manager of Hawaii Information Consortium, which manages the state's Web site www.ehawaii.gov.

"Hawaii's people are pretty online-savvy and we've managed to keep up with that," he said.

Recktenwald said the resulting elimination of paperwork is a "great benefit" for the government that should make processing of documents more efficient and faster. He said the state was likely to fold more functions into the Web site, which could include the ability to file general excise tax online and access a host of other business-related online forms.