In recent years, Da Nang’s government departments and agencies have paid special attention to accelerating administrative reform by taking many effective solutions.

Residents make transactions at the 'One-Stop-Shop' Division at the Da Nang Administrative Centre. Photo: NGOC PHU

Administrative reform stepped up

Over the past time, the city's leaders have always identified administrative reform, especially in departments and agencies, as a central and cross-cutting task, and as one of the important driving forces for the city's socio-economic development.

According to Deputy Director of the municipal Department of Internal Affairs Tran Trung Son, last year, city-based government departments and agencies widely publicised administrative reform by issuing an e-handbook on handling land-related administrative procedures, developing instructional videos, printing propaganda manuals on satisfaction surveys in the city, and deploying an administrative transaction timer utility at the all-level divisions for receiving dossiers and returning the results of administrative procedures.

Additionally, a handful of new initiatives and improvements have been applied, thereby improving work handling efficiency, and better serving people and businesses.

Prominent among them are to pilot the urban government model; issue a number of mechanisms and policies specific to the city’s progress; strengthen the organization of specialised agencies under the municipal People's Committee; pilot the model of transferring the task of receiving and returning the results of administrative procedures at agencies and units; sign regulations on coordination in management and use of software to exchange, look up information and build a database of judicial records in the city; remove the document component which is a copy of the business registration certificate for the records that have been searched on the enterprise database on a trial basis.

Administrative reform associated with digital transformation

According to the results of the Provincial Public Administration Reform Index (PAR INDEX) in 2021, 4 out of the 21 units, departments and sectors achieved excellent PAR Index results, 12 good PAR Index results, and 5 fairly good PAR Index results. There are no units with in medium and weak results.

Ranked second in 2021 PAR Index results in the category of departments and sectors, the municipal Department of Information and Communications has made much positive progress in administrative reform.

Deputy Director of the Department Tran Ngoc Thach said his unit always identifies administrative reform as a key and motivating task, especially in the context of digital transformation.

Till date, 100% of households have connected to broadband fiber. The coverage rate of 3G and 4G networks in the city reaches 100% whilst the 5G network service has been launched.

Currently, the Department of Information and Communications is focusing on building and developing platform systems, data, and applications for internal services, and residents and businesses.

Also, the Mini IOC centralized monitoring system and 6 basic smart city services according to the urban service pilot guideline of the Ministry of Information and Communications have been put into use.

Furthermore, 12 additional services such as monitoring of water and air environment, monitoring the situation of COVID-19, open data, monitoring garbage truck journeys, etc have been deployed. There have been specialised monitoring centres: traffic cameras, security cameras and environmental monitoring.

Director of the municipal Department of Natural Resources and Environment To Van Hung said that the unit has concentrated on renewing the direction and administration of all levels to save time and costs, and simplify administrative procedures related to residents and businesses.

Thanks to its great efforts, the performance of the department's administrative reform tasks has changed positively as the unit jumped to 8^th place in 2020 from 15^th place in 2019, and 22^nd place in 2018. Last year, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment was named among top 5 departments and sectors under the municipal People's Committee.

Since mid-2021, 150 administrative procedures at the Department of Natural Resources and Environment has gone online at level 4, 39 of them related to the field of land registration have been transferred to the district-level branches of the Da Nang Land Registration Office for handling.

Records related to public services in the land sector have been also digitised and updated in the land database, ensuring 100% digitisation of records in this field.

In 2021, the rate of receiving and handling online land applications was initially less than 20% of the total number of records. However, by the end of May 2022, the rate increased to nearly 40%.

In addition, sending tax notices online is highly effective, saving people time and money in the process of filing administrative procedures.

In the first half of the year, the number of text messages sent to citizens to inform tax payments was 12,694. The administrative transaction timer service has been activated and deployed by the municipal Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

Reporting by TRONG HUY - Translating by M.DUNG