A COMPANY which stores business registration documents on behalf of the Business and Intellectual Property Authority said they are not to blame for the slow delivery of records.
The private entity, known as Document Warehouse, got a three-year contract to store various documents for Bipa last year.
This comes after a report by The Namibian two weeks ago, where concern was raised about the length of time taken to locate documents before they are given to individuals and entities upon request.
During a meeting on Friday, operations director at Document Warehouse, Ino Kamona, said as per their contract, they have been delivering the requested files in 24 hours.
She said if there was a delay, it was not from their side as their documents are given bar codes and the files are indexed, and tracked for various processes in such a way that it can be easily found without going to great lengths.
Kamona said in case of emergency, there is a two-hour express service for critical requests.
Sales and marketing manager Ray Vries said they work with 4,1 million documents manually, while 49 million have been scanned to date as their attempt to move towards digitalisation.
He said of the 4,1 million, 225 360 belong to Bipa, whom they are also assisting through digitising their documents and allowing Bipa staff to use their system when receiving and disseminating documents.
Training consultant at the Document Warehouse, Marilize Cohen, said the first batch of documents from Bipa was moved to the Document Warehouse in July 2016 from Bipa’s old storage at Prosperita in Windhoek.
She said they first had to clean up the documents and files from Bipa, before they were brought for storage at the warehouse, and then indexed and barcoded for easy searches.
Cohen said Bipa is being assisted by the warehouse to also provide training for their people so that in the end they will be able to do the storage themselves.
Bipa’s records manager Himee Kamburona said one of their biggest challenges is missing files and documents.
He said the many files and documents were lost when Bipa to allowed individuals and entities to take the files with them, but this issue will be dealt with as people are no longer allowed to take files out of Bipa premises.
He also spoke about the planned integrated client services which will be introduced soon to allow clients to get an electronic version of files they request for.
The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business report produced last year said Namibia dropped by four places to 108th out of 189 countries in the world.
Namibia has continuously ranked low regarding the setting up of businesses, partly because of the long registration process which takes more than 60 days, while accessing company documents also takes longer.
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