2nd Annual Philippines OpenGov Leadership Forum
April 19, 2018
Thank you for this award, and on behalf of Secretary Carlos Dominguez I would like to say a few words.
He would like to express his gratefulness for this award.
He wants to thank you for recognizing the comprehensive efforts of the Department of Finance along with the rest of the government to employ the powerful tools of information and communications technologies in order to reduce transaction costs.
Thank you, too, for the great work your organization is doing in encouraging governments to be more efficient through the adoption of new technologies. Your work in documenting and disseminating information about e-governance has been very helpful. It makes us aware of initiatives and best practices elsewhere. You prompt us to act with a little more urgency towards adopting new platforms that make our work easier and government more accessible to its citizens.
The Department of Finance is honored by the recognition of the excellence of our TradeNet platform.
This particular platform became operational late last year and was entirely designed and built by Filipino talents. It is intended to minimize the cost of doing business in the country by reducing the processing time for import/export clearances and cut the number of transactions and required documents by enabling several agencies to share a common database.
Initially, 16 government agencies were connected online to the old National Single Window (NSW) developed in 2009. With the more robust TradeNet system, we expect a total of 66 agencies to be interoperable through this platform. TradeNet replaced the old NSW.
TradeNet will soon serve as the country’s link to the ASEAN Single Window (ASW) gateway. This will enhance intraregional trade immeasurably. By the middle of this year, we expect 20 government agencies to be linked with the ASW.
I should mention that there are other parallel initiatives that are part of this government’s comprehensive deployment of information and communications technologies to enhance governance efficiency.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) recently launched the Government Cloud service (GovCloud). A National Government Portal was launched June last year for all government information, transactions and services. The increased use of ICT is part and parcel of our Expanded Anti-Red Tape Act that puts a cap on the time required for approval or disapproval of applications for licenses, clearances and permits. This will have a substantial impact in curbing corruption among our frontline agencies.
At the initiative of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), we launched the PHPAY platform last year. This is a centralized online payment portal, transactions ledger and reconciliation system. It is designed to provide government agencies a way to interface their service websites to payment facilitators, banks or credit card gateways making it easier for private users to pay for permits or applications.
The Philippine Business Data Bank (PBDB), for its part, is a search engine for all registered businesses in the country. It will be available online for government agencies to verify records for business registration and permits. The PBDB will bring together for easier reference information from the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) and the local government units. TradeNet uses this databank for verifying business information.
All these initiatives on the part of the public sector will be matched by initiatives in the private sector to make transactions easier, simpler and more transparent. These will complete the e-governance ecosystem that will be helpful in building a strong, competitive and inclusive economy for our people.
As we embrace the inherent disruptions of modern technologies, we would soon be reinventing government itself to make it more responsive, more accessible and more accountable to its citizens. As they absorb and adopt emerging technologies, governments will never be the same again. We are prepared to take that challenge.
All the efforts to build modern information and communications technologies into our processes will make both government and the economy ready for this century. As the disruptive technologies advance very quickly, we must be prepared to make changes in the way the public sector does things. Modern digital technologies, we know, are anathema to inefficiency and incompetence.
Over the next few years, be prepared to observe government processes change very quickly. Change has come. We fully intend to be at the cutting edge of modern governance.
Thank you and good day.