Improving service quality

According to Mrs. Nguyen Thi Ngoc - Director of the Archives Center, since 2016, the Center has built and implemented the Project "Electronic record storage system of the social insurance industry". Accordingly, all dossiers for monthly social insurance benefits stored at the Center have been digitized to store in parallel with paper and electronic records.

Up to now, there have been 4,915,714 records for monthly social insurance benefits (equivalent to 3,070 meters of document shelves) digitized to store nearly 25 million pages of electronic documents. Electronic data is stored at the Industry Data Center and shared to 63 social security offices of provinces and centrally-run cities and more than 700 social security offices of districts so that they can directly exploit and use the dossiers to enjoy social insurance benefits for administrative procedures and resolve regimes and policies for people and employees.

Since September 2020, the Archives Center has terminated receiving paper dossiers from the social security offices of provinces and cities. Electronic records must be updated to the Electronic Records Retention System of the Industry with the correct and full composition as prescribed. For the inappropriate ones or lacking components as prescribed, the Archives Center shall continue to receive paper dossiers to digitize and promptly update on the System.

According to Ngoc, the actual implementation shows that, the application of IT in digitizing dossiers enjoying social insurance has helped the exploitation and provision of information to agencies, organizations and individuals quickly and effectively operate, thereby shortening the time to settle the regimes and policies of social insurance for beneficiaries. This will contribute to reforming administrative procedures, improving the efficiency of IT application in all business processes of the industry in general and the archive work in particular.

“The digitization to build an electronic record storage system ensures the reliability of information after digitization, high integrity and safety for dossiers, ensures backups of original archives and assists in document maintenance and control. As a result, the physical and chemical degradation of the original document is minimized due to frequent storage during extraction and searching. In addition, data digitization will help the industry facilitate sharing information sources to serve the exploitation and use needs of agencies, organizations and individuals.” - emphasized Ngoc.

Illustrative image (source: Internet)

Striving for ahead-of-schedule completion

In April 2020, the Prime Minister (PM) issued Decision No. 458/QD-TTg on approving the Scheme "Electronic document archiving of state agencies for the period 2020-2025". Accordingly, specific objectives and targets of building and implementing electronic archives at state agencies must ensure at least 80% of archived documents are created electronically in accordance with the law on electronic transactions and storage; At least 90% undergo exploitation process and using documents stored in a network environment, etc.

To accomplish this goal, the Archives Center (VSS) has proposed to develop an implementation plan of Decision No. 458/QD-TTg and the Plan to digitize dossiers and archives of Vietnam's social security industry. Accordingly, the digitization of dossiers and archives of Vietnam social security industry is proposed to be implemented in 2 phases. Specifically: Phase 1 - Pilot digitization of documents at the Archives Center (VSS) to learn from experience, which must be completed by December 31, 2022; During the implementation process, the digitizing software and process will be built and upgraded and the archival document management system will be completed. On that basis, the Vietnam Social Security will issue a list of dossiers and documents to be digitized at the local social insurance agency; At the same time, the agency shall base on which to select documents that need to be digitized and organize the development and implementation of digitalized plans in different professional processes. In phase 2, the digitization of dossiers and documents at social security offices of provinces and districts will be completed at the latest on December 31, 2024.

According to the requirement of the Scheme "Electronic document archiving of state agencies in the period 2020-2025", the upgrade and completion of the electronic recordkeeping system of the Vietnam social security industry must ensure integration, interconnection and information sharing with the Document Management and Operating System and other professional softwares, with a view to serving the statistical work, searching and analysis of data on social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance; to extract filed documents into the archives agency; to perform professional processes stored in the electronic environment in accordance with the e-Government model. In terms of progress, this will be completed by December 31, 2020.

Recently, at a meeting to collect opinions on the electronic storage and digitization of the industry's dossiers and documents, VSS General Director Nguyen The Manh asked the Archives Center to work closely with the IT Center in order to build integrated software to unify the general storage process for the whole industry, thereby, concretize the separate storage processes of each operating unit.

The General Director also asked relevant agencies, social security offices of provinces and cities to learn from the current situation of the locality and units to contribute ideas for building lists of documents that need to be digitized and classifying dossiers and documents of the whole industry. Accordingly, the collection of suggestions and advice should be done immediately; the processes related to the electronic archiving and digitization of the Industry's dossiers and documents must be accelerated and completed ahead of schedule under the Government's Scheme.