Prime Minister, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, has urged ministries and localities to have 30% of their online public services reach level 4 by the end of this year. He was speaking at an online meeting of the National Committee on e-government, earlier this week.
Public services at level 4 allow users to fill in and send application forms to the wards’ people’s committees entirely online. The forms are then processed online, and users can pay the fees online.
Building e-government is an urgent task to promote the country’s growth. The country’s e-government growth index moved up two places in a global survey released by the United Nations in July. The country aims to climb ten places in the global ranking by the end of this year, he said. The current percentage of online public services remains low. Eight ministries and 25 localities have less than 10% of their public services online.
He asked the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) to monitor the progress of localities. From 2021, the government will release the e-government ranking of 63 provinces and cities. There is an urgent need to have a legal foundation for open and transparent data sharing to effectively use the data Vietnam has. It is building a national population database, so it must share the data, he noted.
He also stated that some national databases that serve as core parts of e-government are being slowly implemented, such as the national database on land. From the experience of ministries and sectors’ investment in information and technology (IT), the Prime Minister highlighted the need to spend a proper proportion of the state budget on IT.
MIC proposed increasing local budget spending on information and technology from the current rate of 0.3% to at least 1% to promote e-government. There are now more than 50,000 technology businesses in the country with many new solutions from young enterprises and experts, serving domestic demand and export, the Prime Minister said, asking ministries and sectors to propose policies to facilitate the development of IT businesses.
The number of digital businesses is expected to increase to 70,000 by 2025 and 100,000 by 2030, as per the MIC draft national strategy on digital businesses.
According to the government office, after eight months of operation, the National Public Service Portal has provided 1,039 online services and 6,842 online administrative procedures at four levels. The portal has logged more than 60 million accesses of more than 235,000 accounts, more than 15 million documents synced, and more than 295,000 documents processed online.
It also received more than 24,000 calls and 7,800 pieces of feedback. Since the online payment system was launched on the portal in March, there have been more than 9,000 transactions. In August alone, there have been 3,000 transactions worth about VNĐ 5 billion (around US$ 216,094).
Furthermore, through the government’s “Make in Vietnam” program, Vietnam will improve the quality of growth, build an autonomous economy, and participate more deeply in the global value chain. This approach will help the country soon realise the goal to become a modern industrialised country.
