The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it had temporarily halted the issuance of civil documents online as of earlier that morning. On Friday, the Home Ministry closed down its Web site's service that had been issuing to Koreans 21 types of civil documents that could be downloaded and presented as official. The ministry took the step after an opposition lawmaker, Kwon Oh-eul of the Grand National Party, showed the National Assembly how easy it was to forge or alter documents downloaded from government Web sites. His presentation was made during this year's oversight hearings by the Assembly of the Home Ministry.
The Supreme Court said that it closed its system because it is similar to that of the ministry. The court said, however, that it knew of no instances of forged or altered documents.
As of August, 2.6 million civil documents had been issued via the Internet at the Home Ministry alone. This year, the monthly average was about 15,000-20,000 documents.
The halting of the service has not gone down well with the public. Yesterday afternoon at the Gangnam regional court's registry office in southern Seoul, people waited in long lines for documents, many complaining that it was taking hours to do what they could do earlier in five minutes at home.
The Supreme Court said it issued about 40,000 online documents daily before it suspended the service yesterday.
Seoul has been proud of its e-government efforts, which it sees as a natural complement to the extensive broadband digital networks in place in Korea. The projects began in 2003, when people could view copies of civil documents online; in September 2003, the first three types of documents were issued online.
In April 2004, Koreans were able to print out copies of their resident registration documents. "That was an important project to the government, because people could directly experience the improvement of government services," a Home Ministry official said.
A part of a larger "Government for Citizens" project which started in 2000, this civil document-issuing scheme demanded improvements in the linkages between administrative offices, and that led to new business for digital systems companies.
Analysts estimate that system integration businesses here have revenue of 20 trillion won annually and are growing at 25 percent per year. The competition has been fierce in the scramble to develop e-government. Most of Korea's large conglomerates have their own subsidiaries to build their internal network systems, leaving the government, financial and medical markets as the main hunting ground for hungry computer engineers.
Autor: Wohn Dong-hee
Quelle: Joongang Ilbo, 28.09.2005
