Yesterday the National Commission for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization and the Administration held a round table with representatives of the Ministry of Social Policy, the Pension Fund, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Customs Service, the Central Election Commission and other bodies. At the event, the "informatizers" announced that they intend to unify all existing databases of both legal entities and individuals so that they function as a single system.
According to officials, there are currently about 40 state registers in Ukraine, but there is practically no data exchange between them. As a result, the state spends a great deal of money and labor on different agencies processing the same data. And people stand in huge queues and fill in questionnaires for different bodies that essentially collect the same data. For example, the Central Election Commission alone permanently employs about 2,500 staff who enter and process data in the system.
Ihor Syrotenko, a member of the NCCIR, expects that it will be possible to redistribute the public funds earmarked for informatization so that they also suffice to create a unified information and communication platform. Incidentally, this year the budget provides more than UAH 1 billion for the procurement of informatization services and tools.
According to Syrotenko, the unification of the registers will serve as the basis for new forecasting models of the country's development. In other words, ideally government bodies will be able not only to exchange the information they collect, but also to obtain analytical calculations of the processes taking place in the country. That is, the state will have at its disposal a kind of global computing machine into which input data can be entered to obtain an analysis of the situation. In this way, one could calculate, for example, the ideal retirement age (both for citizens themselves and for the national budget).
Ukrainian IT companies, which once created these very registers and now continuously refine them, have declared their readiness to risk their own money to create a unified register. In particular, Oleksandr Kardakov, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Oktava (which controls Incom), said that 3–4 IT companies could unify all the systems if the government bodies were willing. He was supported by Anton Marrero, President of Softline. According to Kardakov's estimates, launching the project would require several hundred thousand dollars.
The businesspeople note that what interests them in the project above all is the opportunity to provide additional paid information and reference services to both the public and businesses.
Kardakov cited the example of the Baltic states, where more than a thousand services are provided to the public on the basis of a unified "e-Government" data system. In Ukraine, he said, the state cannot implement a host of new services because it is impossible to "link up the registers". Experts also cite the example of Estonia, where more than a hundred different databases are combined into a single system. And a tax return can be completed online within a few minutes. Or rather, one simply ticks a box, since all income data arrive automatically and the document only needs to be checked.
Based on the experience of other countries, a single government portal ready to accept online payments will be created in Ukraine using information from all the registers. As a rule, only some public services are provided for a fee. For example, according to the Belarusian "e-Government" project, which is to be created in 2015, these will be services of the State Property Committee — 8 different e-certificates related to real estate, land and the certification of various rights to such property.
So far, most government bodies are very wary of the informatization regulator's idea. They do not want to pour their data into a common pot. Representatives of IT companies partly explain this by the fact that a number of agencies keep their registers very "sloppily". To convince all government bodies of the need to unify data processing, amendments to the laws of Ukraine will be required. Draft documents are currently being prepared for submission to the Verkhovna Rada.
Source: SiteUa