Digital platform eases dealings with government bureaucracy

Every adult citizen avoided up to sixty visits to public administration offices in 2021 by logging to the gov.gr digital portal.

Last year, the integrated public administration systems either provided digital services to the citizens or exchanged information with each other 566,962,980 times, according to the data of the interoperability center of the General Secretariat of Public Administration Information Systems of the Ministry of Digital Governance.

In the pre-digital days, citizens having to process a case requiring the involvement of multiple public agencies were forced to shuttle the relevant documents between agencies.

The interoperability center allows, through automated calls (web services), the exchange of information between services and registries of the State without any action on the part of the citizen, beyond the granting of his consent. Such calls, last year, exceeded 297 million, up from 37 million in 2020. The number of document authentications using Taxisnet (the tax service) was 265.1 million, while citizens were served 4.5 million times using their web banking codes.

Overall, there were six times as many digital transactions in 2021 as in 2020, when they were 94 million. They were 34 million and 8.8 million in 2019 and 2018, respectively.

This year’s new record is the results of the large number of new applications added to gov.gr. When the digital portal was launched, it had 501 applications and now has around 1,300. Digital transactions spiked partly because of the heavy use of services such as self-test statements, but also the issuance of European certificates for COVID-19. One of the new services launched this year includes the issuance of consensual divorce. Drug prescriptions are the most popular service after self test statements and school cards.

“The number of digital transactions has a direct impact on the daily life of every citizen, as we measure how many queues he was able to avoid. For 2021, a year of pandemic, this number for every adult citizen translates into about 60 public service visits that did not have to be made. The exponential rise of digital transactions in recent years reflects the exponential leap that the state is making in its digital transformation through gov.gr”, said Minister of Digital Governance Kyriakos Pierrakakis.

[moneyreview.gr]