2014-11-27
Electronic services are still not based on the single window principle
The National Audit Office has conducted an audit to assess the efficiency of the implementation of the single window principle when transferring public and administrative services to the electronic environment. “The e-services provided by state and municipal institutions and agencies are still not based on the single window principle because of the failure to ensure preconditions for the effective cooperation between the institutions which develop and provide these services. In addition, it is not always that e-services are provided more efficiently than traditional ones and that electronic services meet the needs of their users,” said Auditor General Giedrė Švedienė commenting on the audit results.
The provision of single window services is complicated by the failure to regulate the coordinator of complex services as well as its rights and responsibilities in respect of the institutions that provide the related services. So far, e-government development projects have been carried out only at the institutional level, because the assessment of the demand for and decision-taking on he centralised creation of new e-services has not been regulated. As a result, separate e-services have been created, rather than a coherent whole. In addition, there is no approved list of major life events for grouping related services, planning their development, and performing their monitoring.
The audit found that the responsible authorities do not always coordinate the related activities with each other, so the e-government policy is formed inconsistently and covers only part of the e-government areas. So far, there is no possibility to determine exactly how many and what kind of services state and municipal institutions and agencies provide to individuals, therefore the state and the providers of public and administrative services are not able to assess the relevance of the services and to monitor and improve their quality. The auditors noted that not all relevant state information resource data is available through the State Information Resources Interoperability Platform, no organisational interoperability framework has been established, which has resulted in a failure to ensure the interoperability of these resources and the possibilities to improve the service provision processes.
The assessment of whether the provision of services is more efficient electronically or in a traditional way showed that when creating e-services, institutions do not review their internal processes and thus do not make use of the possibility to provide services at a lower cost. Also, there is no approved methodology on how to assess the costs of providing services when the services are provided in different ways, and no analysis of these costs is carried out at national level.
It turned out that 70 per cent of the audited services which had been transferred to the electronic environment reduced the administrative burden on the users; however, the users are not always interested in the services and prefer traditional ways. It should be noted that the websites of most of the e-services are still not adapted for the disabled. In addition, not all state and municipal institutions and agencies survey the opinion of the users of e-services, thus failing to ensure that the e-services are always attractive to their users.
The National Audit Office issued recommendations to the Government, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Information Society Development Committee under the Ministry of Transport and Communications to help create preconditions for the efficient provision of e-services observing the single window principle.