Success stories

Success Stories

Online Bidding: A Click Away from Winning

“If you know how to type and click, have a tax ID number and password, then you can use this system .” This is how Artan Isaraj, marketing and logistics manager at Alba Medic sh.p.k., describes working with the new Electronic Procurement System (EPS), one of the e-governance systems put in place by the MCC Albania Threshold project. For Alba Medic, a pharmaceutical company in business since 2003, government contracts account for between 60 to 70 percent of company earnings. EPS is having a very positive effect on the company’s bottom line. According to Isaraj, in short, “Online bidding is cost effective.”...

Downloading Reduces Tax Corruption

The way Ferhat Muhedini sees it, he has three children: a daughter, a son, and his book shop. In the early 1990s, after communist officials with waning power ended publishing restrictions, Muhedini and his father began selling books from a street kiosk. In 2001, he established Friends Book House. Just as with his son and daughter, Muhedini is fiercely protective of his book business but until recently felt at the mercy of the tax inspectors. Until April 2008, small business taxpayers — which represent 75 percent of all taxpayers — had to visit their assigned tax inspectors every three months to collect pre-printed forms necessary to pay Albanian taxes...

E-Services Soothe Corruption Fears

Viola Puçi grew up in Canada but has returned to her native Albania to put her classroom knowledge of “how reforms can change a country” into action. She works with Albinvest, a governmental organization that promotes foreign investment in Albania. These days, her job is being made easier by e-government reforms implemented by the Albanian government and USAID under the Millennium Challenge Albania Threshold Agreement Project, which are creating the kind of positive economic changes she studied in school. According to Puçi, one of the challenges she often faces when speaking with businesses thinking about entering Albania is fear of corruption...

Internet Transforms Tax Services

Before August 2007, Albanian businesses with annual revenues in excess of 8 million lekë ($100,000) had to collect their tax forms from the Tirana Tax Office — some on a monthly basis — before they could pay taxes. To get the forms, they had to seek out their tax inspector, and each inspector was responsible for some 250 firms. As a result, business owners often visited the tax office several times and waited in long lines before securing their forms. In addition, tax inspectors had little time to offer taxpayers any services beyond distributing forms, assessing tax payments, and certifying tax documents...

New Center Eases Way for Business

“It was one of those cases when the client needs a decision today and the report yesterday.” On May 10, 2008, Majlinda Hakani needed to register her financial consulting business quickly. An independent consultant since mid-2007, Hakani had received a short-term offer but her client could only use her services if her business were legally registered. Due to a major public outreach effort, Hakani knew that business registration in Albania has been transformed by the two-year, $13.85 million Millennium Challenge Albania Threshold Agreement...

Saving Time and Money for Growth

In 2007, Ismail Bardhi saw an opportunity to expand his refrigeration business to include mobile units for transporting fresh food. But because he would have to re-register his business to expand it, he kept postponing the change. When he had originally registered his business in 1997, it had taken more than a month and required nearly 12,000 leke ($150) in lawyer’s fees. It had also required a visit both to the courts and to the tax office for an official ID number. In 2008, Bardhi heard about the newly established National Registration Center (NRC), created by the Millennium Challenge Albania Threshold Agreement Project...

Downloading Downs Corruptive Practices in Albania’s Public Procurement

There’s nothing earth shattering in the dictum that “Information is Power”. Yet it is astonishing to witness how insidious its manifestations might be, and at the same time wondrous how technology can even the score. Take this before-and-after story in public procurement in Albania. Prefacing the before-story, let’s say that you as an average interested Albanian business had learned of an upcoming public tender and wanted to obtain the tender documents, then available only in paper format. Picture this: You got to the offices of the contracting authority

VAT Tax Filings: Now Just One-Click Away

Elida Miti, an energetic young woman who exudes confidence, comes out hurriedly from an e-tax training session at the new Taxpayer Service Center (TSC) in Tirana. Both the Center and the training activities have been provided with the support of the Millennium Challenge Albania Threshold Project, and they lie at the heart of the Project’s goal to support the development of e-tax and e-governance within Albania. It’s the 14th, the deadline for filing Albania’s monthly Value Added Tax (VAT) declaration, and Elida might normally be in a panic to file her company’s declaration and payment before the end of the day.

Business Registration in Albania Made Easier: The Happy Story of the “Happy Prince”

Edlira Losha expected the worst as she prepared to register her new business, ‘Princi i Lumtur’(‘The Happy Prince’) kindergarten in late August 2007. And it was not because she knew of the officially unofficial estimate of an average of 47 days to register a business in Albania. With her husband, she had already gone through the process before, and the recollection was far from pleasant. Yet this time it was going to be very different. On September 3, 2007, with support from the Millennium Challenge Albania project, the National Registration Center (NRC) opened in Tirana, Albania’s capital.