Nebojša Vasiljević, Assistant to the Minister of Foreign and Internal Trade and Telecommunications, and Dušan Stojanović, the Director of the Directorate for Digital Agenda highlighted the significant results in the development of e-Government in Serbia during the course of their participation at the roundtable in the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, which focused on reusing public sector information.
“We can say that e-government has come to life in Serbia; that the basic services which citizens use the most and the basic services for businesses are operative. These are primarily the services of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the services of the Tax Administration. We also have an e-Government Portal that provides all the infrastructural support. Of course, this does not mean that we are close to the completion of the job. This basically means that we have seriously started working on the development of e-Government, but a great deal of services and infrastructure components are yet to be developed or enhanced”, said Assistant Minister Vasiljević about the progress in the development of e-Government in our country.
He also pointed out that the electronic signature is being used to its full extent, and commented on the fact that citizens and businesses quickly adapt to the e-Government services.
“We have already forgotten about the waiting in queues for renewing the registration of vehicles, and very few people reflect on the fact that it was actually an electronic service that enabled that. Also, many companies will soon forget that they had to fill a lot of payment slips for taxes and contributions, which are calculated in different ways, and to wait in line at the Tax Administration, etc. So now it can all be done electronically, quickly and easily. However, the most significant of these initial steps will be achieved if we continue with the development in the ongoing direction”, said Vasiljević.
The Director of the Directorate for Digital Agenda Dušan Stojanović recalled on this occasion the importance of e-Government portals to the topic of the gathering: “Everything you will talk about today, is on the e-Government portal and we have an idea to develop an easily accessible platform which we are already offering to all state authorities, an via which they can realize all their services electronically”.
Stojanović also highlighted the excellent cooperation of the Directorate for Digital Agenda with the police, the tax administration and other parts of the administration, in cooperation with whom over 500 services were developed, some of which are constantly active and some which are activated on demand.
“I can say that we also have the additional functionalities that are technologically supported and are operative in a test environment and we are solving certain formalities in order put them into production. First of all, I am referring to payment via the most important credit cards. These are the national brand Dina, then Visa and Master; and we also managed to support the mobile banking service through the “platimo” (let’s pay) service, which also operates in the test mode. The problem that we are facing, and the reason why we have not yet put all these into production is the selection of an acquiring bank. Currently we are working with the Ministry of Finance on developing a model by which we can work this out. Also, in the next two weeks we will activate SMS notification, where citizens will be able to receive notice from the portal via SMS about what, when and how something is completed. When we round up the whole story, along with home delivery, which we are also working on developing, we will have better e-Services”, said Stojanović to the participants at the meeting.
After that, Saša Dulić, assistant director of the Tax Administration gave detailed information on the development and operation of electronic services for the application of VAT, and for the application of taxes and contributions for employees, while Duško Sivčević from the police talked about service to renew the registration of motor vehicles and the replacement of driving licenses.
All the roundtable participants stressed the importance of the information held by public authorities to be available for the reuse for stakeholders whenever there are no reasonable grounds to restrict access to such information. Particular attention was devoted to this topic by Nevena Ruzić, Assistant Secretary General of the Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection.
