Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III has underscored the importance of switching to electronic governance (e-governance) to cut red tape, upgrade the delivery of services to the people and curb corruption in the government.

Dominguez said a bill filed by Senator Christopher Lawrence Go that aims to institutionalize this transition to e-governance responds to President Duterte’s call during his 5th State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA) for the government to make all possible services available to the people from the comfort of their homes or workplaces via digitalization.

“So it makes it easier for the citizen to deal with you, it makes it easier for you to deal with them. So this is an important move,” Dominguez said of Go’s e-governance bill during a recent televised meeting called by the President with selected members of the Cabinet.

According to the explanatory note of Go’s measure—Senate Bill (SB) No. 1738 or the E-Governance Act, “mandates the government to establish an integrated, interconnected, and interoperable information and resource-sharing and communications network spanning the entirety of the national and local government; an internal records management information system; an information database; and digital portals for the delivery of public services.”

A counterpart measure—House Bill (HB) No. 1248—has been filed in the House of Representatives by Deputy Speaker Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte to “further improve the ease of doing business—and thus sharpen the country’s global competitiveness as an investment haven—while encouraging people to keep practicing physical distancing in the post-pandemic scenario by letting them transact official business without actually having to go to the various government agencies themselves.”

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In his SONA last July 27, the President said e-governance “will enable our bureaucracy to better transition into the ‘new normal’ and cut or minimize red tape.”

Dominguez said the Bureau of Customs (BOC), which is now in the process of digitalizing its operations, is one good example of how e-governance can improve government services and spot potential irregularities in its operations.

He informed the President during the televised briefing that the bureau, under the leadership of Commissioner Rey Leonardo Guerrero, has put in place a “sophisticated system” that allows the monitoring from the BOC central office of all shipments entering the country’s main ports.

“(The BOC) is quite advanced in digitalization It’s not yet perfect, but he (Guerrero) is moving towards that,” Dominguez said.

Dominguez said the BOC system allows the central office to determine which shipment is being processed in any major port at any given time, along with its declared value and the amount of taxes and duties collected.

“If you use the information well, you can tell which is out of the ordinary and you can spot that,” Dominguez said.

Earlier, Dominguez recommended to the President the adoption of three imperatives centered on digitalization and patterned after the successful Small Wage Subsidy Program (SBWS) implemented earlier by the Department of Finance (DOF) and Social Security System (SSS) to ensure the efficient and corruption-free distribution of future emergency subsidies to targeted beneficiaries.

These three principles are: 1) digitalization of the entire process from application to distribution of the subsidy 2) direct distribution of the aid through banks or electronic payment channels; and 3) adoption of close administrative oversight of the program, which includes tapping the expertise of the private sector to iron out possible implementation hitches as quickly as possible, Dominguez said.

President Duterte has endorsed Dominguez’s recommendations and said these “will lessen corruption” in the distribution of financial aid to beneficiaries in the future.

In his report to the President, Dominguez said that by automating and digitalizing the SBWS–and with manual processing kept to a minimum–the government was able to efficiently and quickly distribute a total of P46 billion to 3.1 million employees of small businesses affected by the work stoppages resulting from last summer’s Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) and other similar containment measures to prevent the further spread of COVID-19.

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