Mai Tien Dung, Minister of the Office of Government and chair of the Prime Minister’s Advisory Council for Administrative Procedures Reform, made the statement at a meeting with 10 ministries on implementing tasks related to building e-Government as well as administrative reform on August 10.

Dung said the national public service portal had integrated and provided 990 online public services from its establishment to August 6, equal to nearly eight months of operation.

It was estimated there were 213,000 registered accounts accessing the national public service portal more than 55.6 million times.

The national public service portal has received over 253,000 online administrative records, dealt with 21,400 phone calls and 7,400 complaints during the time.

The data of the Government Office shows that most ministries and State agencies in the country have connected to the national public service portal in order to receive and send e-documents via the national-document linking system.

Many agencies also applied personal digital signatures to handle their work. Especially, the Ministry of Trade and Industry has provided many essential online public services, including 129 public services for both people and businesses.

Currently, some ministries have provided and integrated their data with the Information Centre on the Government’s Direction, which is scheduled to be launched on August 14. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has integrated enough their data to the centre.

Dung also said that the 1,000th online public service, provided via the national public service portal, would debut on August 14.

He added that running the national public service portal would help save about VND6.72 trillion (US$289 million) each year for society.

Also at the meeting, Dung said the Government Office, an agency designed to assist Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc to handle his work, had pioneered to build and operate some of the e-Government’s fundamental information systems, providing online public services for people and businesses.

For example, the e-Cabinet was operated since June 24, 2019 to help in effectively managing all meetings of the Government as well as applying e-voting that showed results very quickly and correctly, he said.

Additionally, the System of Sending Reports to the Government was launched on March 13, connecting ministries and relevant agencies, receiving e-reports from them to serve the Government’s direction and administration.

The State budget would save about VND460 billion ($19.7 million) each year thanks to the system’s operation.

Dung said that the e-Government was assessed to be more necessary and helpful due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, the demand of people and businesses for using online public services was very high.

He ordered relevant agencies to give more focus to the effectiveness of the online national public service in the future. It aimed to fulfil the target of effectively operating the e-Government and administration reform.

He also told the ministries and sectors to improve their reporting system and issued more detailed circulars to instruct administrative agencies from commune to central levels so that they could smoothly and productively run the system of sending reports to the Government.

For the national public service portal, Dung asked the relevant agencies to constantly simplify administrative procedures to create favourable conditions for both people and businesses. Any service which was assessed to be inefficient would be deleted./.