Gov't plans to use Internet in delivery of services

The government is embarking on an ambitious program to facilitate the delivery of services through the Internet and other digital media, but officials said the country needs to liberalize its telecommunications sector further to make this possible.

Returning from his US trip where he met with key IT industry leaders, Trade and Industry Secretary Manuel Roxas II told reporters that there were still fundamental reforms that need to be addressed for the country to be competitive in the developing e-market in Asia and to realize its goal of becoming the information technology (IT) hub in the region.

Roxas said that government is taking tentative steps to be able to deliver some services in areas where possible, such as registration, data verification, tax remittances and even in the provision of medical information and other health services.

"E-commerce is what the market is evolving into," Roxas pointed out. "Necessarily, governments must consider how to conduct itself not only to remain relevant in terms of governance but also in terms of delivering services."

According to Roxas, there were public services that could be easily delivered electronically and at a radically lower cost than supporting a huge service bureaucracy. "Over the short term this would require investment on the part of the government, but savings will be correspondingly huge over the long term."

One of the critical factors to this development, Roxas, said, is the full liberalization of the telecommunications sector to allow as fast and as thorough a penetration as possible to facilitate the widest access to all services available electronically from both the public and the private sector.

"There was a tremendous jump in our telecommunication density over the last five years, but we need to push this density higher," he explained.

In the Department of Trade and Industry alone, Roxas said the bulk of the transactions being handled by various offices were company registration, something that could easily be done through the electronic media.

"If we can do this soon, it would reduce processing time from as long as two weeks to as short as one day," he said. "This means lower administrative costs on the part of the government agency and faster processing of business requirements for investors. All of this would boil down to a more conducive and convenient investment environment."

Roxas said the Estrada administration is pushing for the immediate passage of the pending bill in both houses of Congress that would govern e-commerce and revolutionize the handling of business transactions.

The e-commerce law would legitimize the emerging instruments spawned by e-commerce such as electronic signatures and contracts for transactions conducted on line. -