“The portal the way it is going to be launched on December 15 is only the first step. To begin with, these are not all the services. There will be 74 priority services. But with time it will regularly be updated to offer more and more functions,” the minister told Komsomolskaya Pravda radio on Monday.
“Starting December 15, one can only find out which services are provided and where and what documents are needed in order to receive them. But starting next year, one will be able to print out forms for the majority of them and even fill them out at the portal,” Shchegolev said.
The portal will be accessible through the Internet. “But in the future, as we work on the portal, we will provide additional services through mobile phones and regular phones, and there will appear information kiosks (booths) … and multi-functional centres in regions where operators will help citizens who don’t know how to use the Internet,” he said.
“This is a single portal for the whole country. People don’t have to think which body or region provides which services,” the minister added.
He said the portal would help the government fight bribes.
“Bribes are one of the goals, I would even say one of the targets,” Shchegolev said.
He said the use of the portal would save time. “We have used the term ‘going to government bodies’, i.e. how many times we have to visit government bodies in order to receive the documents we need. By the roughest estimates, more than 300 million times a year – this are physical inquiries. Since the introduction of public services will go through five stages, each of them will reduce such visits by 20 percent,” the minister said.
There are many websites and portals on the Internet that provide electronic services, but “no such nationwide one-stop shop has ever existed before”.
“We understand that we can’t make it perfect at once. So there will be a special box. If you notice a mistake or if something does not work, send us a message. And we will try to detect such things promptly, too,” Shchegolev said.
He expressed hope that this will become “the people’s website” that “people will help make better”.
The minister estimated the cost of the project at several dozen billion roubles. “We think that if this sum is divided by the visits and inconveniencies our people have experienced, it will justify itself quite quickly. This is one of those budget investments that produce an immediate visible effect,” he said.
The public services portal went on a trial run at the end of November.
“We have launched the programme in a trial-run mode,” he said. “We worked on the programme for a long time, specifically on a list of information services to be provided to our citizens.”
“Authorities proposed the services for which they were best prepared, but did not always match what was wanted by the population,” the minister said. “As a result, we changed the ideology and drew up a list of our services in accordance with the criteria that used to assess electronic preparedness in European countries.”
“We revised the schedule of service commissioning and over 70 public services will be available at the portal by the end of the year,” he added.
“The unified portal of public services will be commissioned at the end of the year. Seventy-four services included in the shortlist are being prepared on a priority basis and made available at the portal,” Shchegolev said.
“The provision of mass public services will improve the quality of service to Russians and rid them of bureaucratic procrastination and exactions,” he said.
In 2010, Russian people will be able to receive about 300 federal services through the single Internet portal (forms and information for obtaining a passport, social allowances, vouchers, and pension). It will contain information on a person’s taxes. For example, the transport, land and property taxes. We also plan to post information about traffic fines so that one knows that he has no penalties or overdue debts and can travel abroad,” Shchegolev said.
According to Shchegolev, the Russian programme of a public services portal is “an ambitious task and it would be useful to take into account the achievements and mistakes of those who have been treading the path of ‘electonisation’ for almost 30 years … With all the difference in the size of our countries, we will launch the portal of public services at the end of the year. In the initial stage it will provide information, but in the next three to four years we will not only increase the number of online public services, but we will also complete the remaining three stages to make them fully electronic,” the minister said.
---
Quelle/Source: ITAR-TASS, 14.12.2009
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
