Electronic Administration as a Component of Financial Efficiency of the State
It is under this slogan that today, on 13 April 2016, the round table discussion was held at the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine. Yurydychna Gazeta, professional weekly, together with the ACC Ukraine have initiated the event.
Krystyna Gutsalova, ProZorro coordinator, project manager of the state procurement reform under the National Council for Reforms, delivered a speech on "ProZorro System of Electronic Procurement: How to Gain an Additional 1 bln UAH per year for the State?". In her opinion, all initiatives related to electronization, which proved to be successful, started as citizen and business initiatives. ProZorro also commenced its activity as a volunteer initiative when no clear vision of the extent of its real importance for the state was realized. "However, we all clearly saw that the situation in the field of state procurement left a lot to be desired as it was inefficient and largely currupt. Therefore, we strived to change the situation and develop an electronic procurement system for the government", said Mrs. Gutsalova. Today, ProZorro is a hybrid procurement system comprising the Centralized Database (plus module of auctions) and electronic platforms. To be able to work in the system, the customer should register on one of the platforms, makes procurement announcement, and such information is to be delivered to the central database and backed up on all platforms. "Simply speaking, ProZorro offers to any businessman from any part of Ukraine opportunity to submit his proposal and take part in state auctions. No set of documents signed and sealed is required. In other words, a businessman shall simply submit his proposal and can keep on bargaining on-line during the actions with his competitors, bring the price down and, thus, win a government contract", explained the speaker.
Today, the shadow segment of the national economy estimated as having about 40% of gross domestic product represents reserve of accumulating resources for state development. Long-term repeated attempts to fight the "shadow" lead to nowhere as the process of unshadowing was based on repression mechanisms, not motivation. This is a statement by Tetyana Volyar, specialist in e-data field, director of IT-company "QB-Tehnology". She finds that success of civilized economic relations development is possible provided business and government continue to meet each other halfway. Instead of pressure and control, a transparent monitoring system should be established. As soon as businessmen see corruption risks reduction, they would demonstrate their interest in fair tax relations with the government. Fiscal monitoring system has been successfully implemented in many European states and has achieved noticeable results in decreasing shadow activity and increasing tax proceeds. Similar systems on the basis of modern hardware have been already developed in Ukraine. In particular, "National Monitoring System" has successfully passed preliminary testing and is being prepared for pilot introduction in several regions. Preliminary assessment shows that proceeds to local budgets may increase by 25%, and to the state budget - almost one and a half times. What is important: such results can be obtained without intensified pressure on business and at no cost for the state budget.
"There are people who have no problems with new technologies: they like new gadgets and new software. There are people who experience too much stress in view of technologies. They are not knowledgeable in technologies. There are states like that. Ukraine belongs to this category. It can be explained, in the first hand, by the fact that there are no set procedures in our state how to deal with a technical component. And it slows down significantly the process of introducing e-government", - noted Artem Afyan, lawyer, managing partner at Juscutum. The lawyer covered the topic "Legal Responsibility, Why Ukraine is not Estonia: About Difficulties in Introducing e-government". According to him, Ukrainian government spends big money on ІТ sector. A number of programmers per capita is quite high, seemingly, representing huge resource for IT-innovations. It goes about billions of dollars. But as to introducing e-government, Ukraine faces problems. "It is only this year, when Ukraine has adopted informational strategy of development. Our government is lacking political will and clear vision of correct interaction with ІТ-sector", stressed the lawyer. The fact that currently most of technological solutions are taken by volunteers is a sign of Ukraine’s total collapse in the IT-field.
Tetyana Popova, Chairman of the Board of Internet Association of Ukraine, is sure that having volunteers' initiatives is good. But, from the other hand, it is not good that they are operating in the absence of unified standards and requirements to services they are ready to provide. "We should create one consolidated body of central authority in our country that would integrate all the functions that have to be performed by the government to provide us with electronic administrative services and would control electronic communications", stressed Mrs. Popova.