>>> More support for people affected by COVID-19
Speaking at a webinar held by the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council on Reforming Administrative Procedures and the World Bank on May 19, the senior 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 also monitor the process and at the same time the Government Office can also accompany, urge, monitor and rectify issues and difficulties as they arise, he added.
According to the minister, from only eight public service groups provided at its opening last December, up until now, the National Public Service Portal has provided 395 online public services, including 232 ones 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 save a lot of time and cost 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 VND6.5 trillion each year, of which, the portal alone contributes over VND3 trillion.
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Minister - Chairman of the Government Office Mai Tien Dung speaks at the event. (Photo: baochinhphu.vn)
Minister Dung said that as of May 18, the portal has recorded 37 million visits, over 142,000 registered accounts, including 1,149 enterprises' accounts (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 has received over 11,000 calls from people and businesses and completed the handling of nearly 4,500 responses and proposals.
In order to support people and businesses facing difficulties due to COVID-19, from May 12, the portal has provided six additional public services to provide said support. Minister Dung added that 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 VND62 trillion bailout package, but also helps to monitor negative acts and misrepresentation in the work.
Expressing his excitement at Vietnam's success in curbing the global COVID-19 epidemic, the World Bank Vietnam Country Director, Ousmane Dione, said that it’s time to highlight the lessons learnt from the need to digitise and provide public services quickly.
Proposing to speed up the digitisation process, Dione said that COVID-19 is a wakeup call for business leaders to accelerate this work, saying that enterprises operating in an online environment will experience less disruption.
According to the World Bank official, the government should simplify business processes and act as a launching pad for the digitisation process.
