Digitising public and administrative services in a high-quality, efficient and functional way helps citizens to access services more conveniently, and makes government operations more efficient, transparent and smooth. The National Audit Office's audit "Managing the digitalisation of public and administrative services" found that the management of the digitalisation of the services needs to be improved: it is necessary to ensure that services are available on a one-stop shop basis, to establish an effective monitoring and quality assessment system and to accelerate the implementation of the digitisation of all public and administrative services.
In 2022, Lithuania is ranked 10th out of 27 EU countries in terms of the provision of digital public services. In 2014-2020, EUR 96 million was allocated to digitalisation projects for public and administrative services in the country, and a further EUR 238 million is planned by 2030. The Electronic Government Gateway is a portal through which 649 public and administrative services are accessible.
The National Audit Office's audit shows that 86% of the users of the Electronic Government Gateway portal have a positive opinion of the services provided, but the auditors point out that not all services of public interest are yet provided through the portal.
"While there have been promises for many years to create a user-friendly and clear integrated electronic service delivery system for citizens, there has been no guarantee that all electronic services will be available as a one-stop shop. Almost 57% of institutions reported that not all of their public and administrative electronic services are available through the Electronic Government Gateway portal. In addition, the potential of national development programmes to digitalise public and administrative services is not being sufficiently exploited - 76 out of 134 planned advanced electronic services that should have been launched have not yet been developed," says Markas Marcinkevičius, Head of the Information Technology Audit Department.
The National Audit Office notes that no tools have been developed to monitor and assess electronic service quality. Data from a survey of state institutions and municipalities show that 85.3% of institutions do not carry out user-friendliness assessments of public and administrative electronic services and do not identify the needs for changes in the service delivery process. These reasons lead to a significant share of the Electronic Government Gateway portal being taken up by services that could theoretically be provided but for which there is no demand. As many as 61.5% of the electronic services available in the portal have not been used once or have been used only up to 10 times by the population in 2022.
The National Audit Office made recommendations to the Ministry of Economy and Innovation and the Ministry of the Interior. Their implementation would ensure a higher level of accessibility, availability and user-friendliness of electronic services: at least 85% of institutions (2.5 times more) would assess the user-friendliness of these services, and 25% more services would be available through the Electronic Government Gateway portal.