Moving national services online is beneficial for many reasons, and the national portal is the most effective channel to digitise administrative procedures, the Chairman of the Government Office, Mai Tien Dung, has stated.
Last month, speaking at a webinar held by the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Reforming Administrative Procedures and the World Bank, the government official said that the process also creates more monitoring channels to ensure the transparency of ministries, agencies, and localities in handling administrative procedures.
Citizens and businesses can monitor the process and at the same time, government officials can also supervise and rectify issues and difficulties as they arise.
According to a media report, from only eight public service groups provided at its opening last December, the National Public Service Portal now provided 395 online public services.
These include 232 dedicated to businesses, with some groups seeing a large frequency of implementation and effective services, such as registering/announcing promotion, applying for certificates of origin of goods, paying fines regarding administrative violations in the field of transport, and procedures related to insurance and tax.
The portal also helps businesses time and costs as administrative procedures of all ministries, sectors and localities can be performed therein. It is expected that the total social cost saved when implementing online public services is about nearly VN ₫6.5 trillion (about US $278 million) each year, of which, the portal alone contributes over VN ₫3 trillion (about US $128 million).
In March and April, the number of accounts doubled with an average increase of 22,000 accounts a month, and over 7.5 million records synchronised, along with over 71,000 applications being processed through the portal.
It received over 11,000 calls from people and businesses and completed the handling of nearly 4,500 responses and proposals.
In May, the portal recorded 37 million visits, over 142,000 registered accounts, including 1,149 business accounts.
To support people and businesses facing difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the portal provided six additional public services.
The services include supporting employees who postpone labour contracts or leave without pay, supporting employers to access loans to pay workers’ discontinued wages, declaring the payment of enterprise income tax extension, declaration of personal tax payment extension, suspension of contribution to the pension and death benefit fund, and receiving and handling feedback and proposals from the public and enterprises.
It is expected that the six new public services on the portal will support about 4 million workers and employers facing difficulties due to the epidemic.
It will also shorten the processing time from six to ten working days for each task, compared to the direct implementation, the report added.
Providing public services to support people and businesses in difficulty because of the pandemic not only helps shorten the time to disburse financial supports from the government’s VN ₫62 trillion (about US $2.6 billion) bailout package, but also helps to monitor negative acts and misrepresentation in the work.
An industry expert said that COVID-19 is a wakeup call for business leaders to speed up the digitisation process; enterprises operating in an online environment will experience less disruption.
According to a World Bank official, the government should simplify business processes and act as a launching pad for the digitisation process.
