Single online portal eyed for all gov’t transactions

All online transactions in one centralized government portal.

An executive order is in the works toward that goal by requiring government departments and agencies to transfer their online data and systems to a single portal maintained by the Department of Information and Communication Technology (DICT).

That way, citizens need to access only one site to transact with the government online.

Information and Communication Secretary Rodolfo Salalima said he asked President Duterte to issue the executive order to facilitate the setting up of the portal. Salalima hopes to complete it in six months.

“Our citizens, instead of, say for example, commuting from one department of government to another just to transact business with its branches of government, can transact using the portal,” Salalima said in a press briefing in Malacañang.

He said some 125 government agencies, mostly the smaller ones, have already migrated their online data and processes to the DICT.

The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and the Commission on Elections (Comelec) are among these agencies, he said.

These offices believe their data are safer with the DICT, and the transfer has been helpful, he said.

“In fact, after this income tax filing last April, the BIR wrote us a letter thanking us for the speed with which people were able to file their income taxes online,” he said.

He also assured the public that the DICT would protect the citizens’ information that would be placed under the department’s control, to prevent a repeat of a similar breach in the Comelec that exposed voters’ data.

“That’s one of the reasons why we are asking the government now to migrate all their databases to us because that it is also part of our mandate and I assure you that the DICT will take care of all your data encoded in the databases of all government,” he said.