Even though Taiwan has signed the World Trade Organization's Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) , it is still unclear how much impact the signing will have on business, a Taipei-based U.S. trade group said Wednesday. The American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Taipei made the remarks in the latest edition of its monthly publication Topics, saying that following Taiwan's July 15 entry as the 41st member of the GPA, 'multinational companies appear to remain somewhat skeptical about how much Taiwan's GPA membership will in fact improve their market access.' Besides the limited degree of English-language information being provided, another major concern is the limited amount of time allotted to prepare a bid -- particularly when translation of documents is needed, according to the AmCham article. In particular, companies are given no more than 24 days to prepare a proposal, which the article says is already a tight schedule, even when days are not lost due to U.S. holidays. Therefore, international bidders have requested that more time be allowed, considering that they need to gather documents from overseas governments certifying their previous project experience, and then have the documents notarized, it adds. An AmCham member company in the engineering field has reported another obstacle that prevented it from bidding in a recent infrastructure tender -- a requirement that vendors prove that they have professionally licensed engineers on their staff from 12 different engineering disciplines, even though some of those specialties are totally unrelated to the project, according to AmCham. The same requirement applied to local companies, but usually only the large domestic engineering firms employ such a broad spectrum of talent, and whether or not the intention was discriminatory, the result was to keep foreign companies from competing for that contract, the trade group adds. 'Due to these kinds of disadvantages, many multinational companies have yet to be convinced that Taiwan is abiding by the spirit as well as the letter of the GPA in opening up its procurement market,' according to AmCham. 