And, no doubt, there have been great improvements in this regard.
But it seems that the web of technology has not reached all corners of what the civil service offers Maltese citizens, as is shown by the experience related below.
A woman contacted The Malta Independent on Sunday to complain that she had had to go personally to the Customs Department to apply for a course she needs to attend to be able to get the authorisation required to pass documents through the same department.
This is because no applications can be made online, and cheques sent by post are not accepted either.
When she complained about this, she was told on the telephone that she could send in her application through a company courier. “It seems that the department thinks that private firms have the luxury of employing messengers just like the public service does,” she said.
“I had no option but to go to the department one morning to apply in person,” she said.
The payment for the course has to be made with the same cashier who handles payment of Customs duties, and so she had to wait in line with a long queue of people who were there for altogether different purposes. “Some of them had many documents and took ages to pay their dues,” the woman said.
“If it was not for the common sense of one department employee who, as soon as he heard what I was there for, asked those who were waiting whether it was possible for me to jump the queue, I would have been there longer, for sure.”
The woman encountered another problem. Since the course in question is only held occasionally – when there are enough people to form the required group – very few department employees know about it. “So I was passed from one office to another with no one really knowing except the people actually involved, and it is hard to find them.”
Many employees she asked had no idea what she was there for, and that the course actually exists. It is time-consuming, she said, when an application online and a wire money transfer would be so much easier and less complicated.
The Malta Independent on Sunday has also been contacted by people who have received the form they are required to complete for the 2011 Census. “It would have been much easier, much simpler and certainly less costly for the government to ask people to fill in their details online,” was a common point made.
So much money has been spent on printing the census forms, and more will be spent to have people going round towns and villages, visiting every house, to collect the completed forms or help people filling them in.
“Census forms should have been printed only for those who do not have access to computers. The number of collectors would have then been much smaller. Having data compiled online would have also made things easier for the final results to be compiled. When data is being copied from paper to a computer there is a greater chance that mistakes will be made, distorting the overall picture,” we were told.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Stephen Calleja
Quelle/Source: The Malta Independent Online, 06.11.2011
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