After his fourth appeal for a reevaluation of his tax audit was met with indifference, the 38-year-old Abiy Aman angrily stormed out of the Kirkos District Small Taxpayers Branch Office around the Qera area.

He had been operating a struggling funeral service business in the same neighbourhood for the past five years. When business slowed to a trickle, he decided to close it down and open a barbershop instead. But before he could do that, he was hit with a 52,000 Br fine due to discrepancies in his books.

"I threw the binder across the office," Abiy told Fortune. "It all happened in the heat of the moment."

Despite receiving clearances for renewals each year, Abiy was baffled by the demand for penalties.

The woes extended to his personal life, as he was compelled to send his daughter to live with his ex-wife after having trouble covering basic expenses around the house. He decided to arrange an instalment payment modality, to settle every two months and a half by borrowing from acquaintances.

"I'm feeling overwhelmed," he said.

It is customary to hear of business owners in Ethiopia frustrated with the bureaucratic hurdles concerning tax payments, obtaining or closing licenses, construction permits, customs clearance and inaccessibility of credit.

Far from astounding is that business owners such as Abiy would be faced with challenges with Ethiopia having a rank of 178 in minority investor protection. However, the situation is symptomatic of a deeper malaise as giant companies such as Unilever, with annual turnovers north of 60 billion euros worldwide, also face serious problems.

The Country Communication Affairs Director Degsew Amanu explained that his company's regulated corporate structure consistently clashes with unscrupulous actors embedded within the bureaucratic environment.

"Taxes, customs and forex are significant hurdles," he said.

Degsew disclosed that after global procurement procedures that meet international standards across 190 countries, clearance at the customs commission includes delayed clearances and dealing with under-invoice allegations from officers.

Unilever produces around eight brands in Ethiopia, commanding over 50pc of the detergent market with products such as Sunlight and Omo.

The company have had a growing popularity among consumers over the past few years, showcasing Signal toothpaste and Lifebuoy soap, which are locally produced. It opened its first on-ground operations in 2015 at Eastern Industrial Park in Dukem town, 35km southeast of Addis Abeba, with 7,000 employees.

Degsew went on to emphasise that issues are exacerbated by the difficulty of finding an ear from government officials to clarify the vast array of products and services it provides.

"We are a global brand offering a multitude of products," Degsew said, "not a business worth a few millions."

He also indicated that security issues had created hurdles in transporting inputs and products to local markets, all the while conceding that "conflicts are clearly bad for business".

The sentiment is fortified by the last World Bank index, which ranked the country 159th from 190 countries on ease of doing business by looking at 10 indicators.

International companies and non-profit organisations continue to use the parameters of the index to evaluate countries, despite the annual report being suspended in 2022 following allegations of data manipulation.

With the goal of getting the country's ranking below 100, a series of initiatives were launched by Prime Minster Abiy Ahmed (PhD) four years ago.

The Ethiopian Customs Commission, often cited as a source of frustration by importers for extended inspections and a lethargic clearance process, was among the institutions winded to improve its efficiency.

Head of the Risk Management Directorate Desk at the Commission, Gebreyesus GebreHiwot, indicated that an adjustment of priorities to balance regulation with business promotion was necessary.

He reflected on the Commission's contributions to the poor index ranking by recalling that 60pc of imports were tagged red, which entails conducting excessive physical inspections of merchandise.

"Too many shipments were considered high risk," he told Fortune.

Gebreyesus points to the reduction in the percentage of red-tagged imports to a fourth of the amount. He believes that control needs to be balanced with incentivising investment indicating the shift in priorities.

The director said the establishment of an intelligence team, a post-clearance audit system in which officers go to warehouses after they leave the Commission's compound and customer compliance schemes have filled in for manual inspections.

Gebreyesus indicated that all coffee exports and 75pc of sesame and oilseed exports have a green tag, which means permission for immediate clearance, as recent developments within the ease of business initiative.

He also indicated that prices and risk evaluations for any novel products by overseas companies are taken from trade unions and sectoral associations in the country. Gebreyesus acknowledged the importance of strengthening capacity building to enable the wider use of technology.

An electronic form to be filled by the applicant and a new operational manual which integrates different departments developed 12 years ago by an Indian company for 203,000 dollars and upgraded last year, are used by the Commission. But, high-ranking officials such as Commissioner Debele Kebeta acknowledged last week that unethical behaviour from the employees has a reverberating impact nationwide.

A practice deemed instrumental to curbing such practices and boosting the ease of doing business is electronic alternatives for manual procedures. Its adoption, however, has been gradual and unevenly distributed between cities and regional states.

Enabling the issuance of licenses through a digital system is espoused as an ongoing effort by the Addis Abeba Trade Bureau.

"We are digitising on all frontiers," said Sewnet Ayele, communication director.

He pointed to the two-year-old E-Trade system, an online platform that provides 16 business license services, as an indicator of the progressive approach. Of the 98,246 business license-related services given by the Bureau in the current fiscal year, about a tenth are new issuances while over 57,000 are renewals.

Sewnet acknowledged that Addis Abeba performs better on the digital front than other charter cities and regional states despite having a long way to go in integration between the public and government bureaus.

He underscores the importance of partnering with other public offices to alleviate the frustration citizens looking for service have to go through. He said their hotline number is constantly busy with urbanites from different parts of the capital forwarding complaints and indicating gaps in customer service.

The trade bureau works with tax authorities in order to enable the renewal, issuance and cancellation of business licenses.

The Addis Abeba Revenues Bureau, which has managed to collect 15 billion Br in the first month of the current fiscal year, is working towards raising the amount past the 140 billion mark for the year.

The E-tax system, which has been slowly gaining traction over the past three years is still restricted to "C" or low-income taxpayers who earn less than a million Birr.

"There is a lot more work to be done," said Wondemagegnehu Kassye, tax assessment director at the Bureau.

He said the bureau has a system for tax appeals that takes into account several measures as part of its initiative to enable ease of doing business. All taxpayers are expected to submit their documents for an audit at least once in a five-year period.

Taxpayers receive the amount they need to pay through SMS, while the exact office to which the payment is to be made is disclosed through the bureau's digital platform.