The UAE is Serious About Cutting Red Tape
By Consaya Editorial — 2026-09-29
The Ministry of Justice sent delegates to Uzbekistan to learn about reducing bureaucracy. That's not the kind of thing that usually moves fast in government.
But it tells you something about the direction here. The UAE has been pushing "Doing Business in 15 Minutes" through Bashr for a while now, and the push is real. Simplified processes, fewer forms, less friction between a business and the state. That's the headline. What matters to you is what comes next.
When governments prioritise cutting red tape, they don't stop at speed. They also push for standardisation and transparency. They want fewer interpretations of the rules, clearer timelines, better visibility into what's actually owed and when. The Ministry's participation in these workshops suggests the UAE is looking at how other countries have cut through confusion without losing control over compliance.
For a consultancy or agency here, that matters. It means the regulatory environment is moving toward clarity rather than away from it. Those aren't new. But the machinery around them—the tools, the deadlines, the filing formats—will probably get cleaner and simpler as these workshops feed into local policy.
It also means the audit trail gets tighter. You need your books in the right shape not because someone's suspicious, but because the system expects it. That shift from discretionary to automatic is already happening in the FTA's approach to VAT compliance and it'll spread.
Consaya keeps your books filing-ready and generates your VAT 201 and corporate-tax packs automatically. It flags what's due each quarter. None of that becomes less necessary when bureaucracy shrinks; it becomes more necessary, because there's nowhere to hide a mistake in a simpler system.
The UAE isn't becoming easier to run a business in by accident.