Phan Ngoc Tho, Vice Chairman of Thua Thien Hue province, emphasizes that the focus of the administrative reform of the Thua Thien Hue province is to build a transparent, advanced and modern administration system in order to create favourable conditions to fully serve the needs of residents and businesses.
According to Mr Tho, the province always recognises the importance of public administration reform and defines this reform as a fundamental to ensure better implementation of the policies and guidelines of the Party and build a transparent, innovative and modern administration system in order to effectively mobilise the social resources for development investment.
How will the administration reform be implemented to achieve the above-mentioned goals?
The first step is how to enhance the determination and consistency of the public officials towards the reform process, which helps them to recognise and efficiently accelerate this process to create more social benefits for businesses and residents of the province.
Second, Thua Thien Hue always recognises the ISO as a powerful support tool in the management, administration and operation, which helps the public supervise the administrative reform for the purposes of shortening the administration procedures and improving the quality of public service of the government agencies. All the administrative procedures of the departments are standardised by the ISO and publicised on the network in order to create favourable conditions for citizens and businesses to access information promptly. Up to now, we have adopted the ISO standard for all units from the district level, and from 2014 will apply to the commune level in the coming time. Along with that, towards the establishment of an e-government to improve the efficiency of the administrative procedures, most agencies are now using website and software utilities for the management and administration processes. As a result, the province currently has 1,788 public administrative services at level 1; 1,094 services at level 2; 36 services at level 3 and 8 other online services, which have been displayed on the electronic portal of the province.
Thua Thien Hue is now applying the quality management system ISO 9001:2008 for the administrative activities to modernise the administrative system and further improve the effectiveness of government management.
Third, we always try to determine the administrative reform to be associated with the heads of the public services agencies. Accordingly, the heads of the agencies need to act as not only the stakeholder and supervisor of the administrative reform, but also the participant of the process. The annual outcomes of the administrative reform are important basis for assessing the completion of tasks, leadership capacity, and responsibilities of the head of the agency, and one of the evaluation criteria to reward individuals and groups.
According to the business community, particularly FDI companies, the business environment generally still has some problems, especially the administrative procedures. What do you think about this response?
It is true that in recent years, the administrative regulations lack uniformity; many regulations on administrative procedures fail to meet requirements of clarity and transparency. This concerns FDI enterprises.
To address this issue, I think first of all, the government should make consistent reform in the management of government for the FDI enterprises towards the direction of consistency, openness, transparency and predictability to facilitate investors and create competitiveness with other countries in the region.
Along with that, we also need to adopt innovative methods to attract investment, as well as promote the images of the nation and provinces via the Internet to provide the investors with information to select the right projects at the right locations. In particular, to improve the evaluation of FDI projects towards minimising administrative procedures, the records are only required to prove the socio-economic effects to ensure the interests of the nation and of each locality. This helps minimise time required for evaluation and licensing to facilitate investors to quickly put their projects into operation.
Could you tell us the main measures of administrative reform that Thua Thien Hue will adopt in the future?
In 2014 and in the following years, the province continues to identify administrative reform as an urgent task and fundamental solution to create a favourable environment for socio-economic development, and is determined to implement reform in the following areas: improvement of the quality of the public officials and application of information technology in the management of the government, application of quality management system of ISO 9001:2008 in administrative activities to modernise the administrative system and further improve the effective management of the government.
In addition, we will continue to strengthen discipline and administrative regulation, enhancing the inspection and examination of the head of the units at every level, ensuring timely detection and strict punishment for those, particularly the leaders, who cause difficulties and bureaucracy for organisations, businesses, and individuals to soon make the province become a central city.
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