Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc chairs an online meeting of the National Committee on e-Government on Wednesday. — VNA/VNS Photo

Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc has urged ministries and localities to have 30 per cent of their online public services reach level 4 by the end of this year.

He was speaking at an online meeting of the National Committee on e-Government on Wednesday.

Public service level 4 allows users to fill in and send application forms to the wards’ people’s committees entirely online. The forms are then processed online and users can pay the fees online.

Building e-Government is an urgent task to promote the country’s growth. Việt Nam’s e-Government growth index moved up two places in a global survey released by the UN in July. The country aims to climb 10 places in the global ranking by the end of this year, he said.

He pointed out that the current percentage of online public services remains low. Eight ministries and 25 localities have less than 10 per cent of their public services online.

He asked the Ministry of Information and Communications to monitor the progress of localities. From 2021, the Government will release the e-Government ranking of 63 provinces and cities.

“There is an urgent need to have a legal foundation for open and transparent data sharing to effectively use the data we have. We are building a national population database so we must share the data,” he said.

He also stated that some national databases which serve as core parts of e-Government are being slowly implemented, such as the national database on land.

From the experience of ministries and sectors’ investment in information and technology (IT), PM Phúc highlighted the need to spend a proper proportion of the State budget on IT.

The Ministry of Information and Communications proposed increasing local budget spending on information and technology from the current rate of 0.3 per cent to at least 1 per cent to promote e-Government.

There are now more than 50,000 technology businesses in the country with many new solutions from young enterprises and experts, serving domestic demand and export, the Prime Minister said, asking ministries and sectors to propose policies to facilitate the development of IT businesses.

According to the Government Office, after eight months of operation, the National Public Service Portal has provided 1,039 online services and 6,842 online administrative procedures at four levels.

The portal has logged more than 60 million accesses of more than 235,000 accounts, more than 15 million documents synced and more than 295,000 documents processed online.

It also received more than 24,000 calls and 7,800 pieces of feedback.

Since the online payment system was launched on the portal in March, there have been more than 9,000 transactions. In August alone, there have been 3,000 transactions worth about VNĐ5 billion.