Islamabad (Khyber Mail): Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh of Vietnam chaired the fifth session of the Government’s steering committee for administrative reform on July 19, 2023. During the meeting, Prime Minister Chinh identified three priority areas for administrative reform in the coming period.
In his remarks, Prime Minister Chinh praised the efforts and achievements made by the committee, ministries, sectors, and localities in advancing administrative reform. However, he also emphasized the need for stronger efforts to better serve the people and businesses.
The three priority areas highlighted by Prime Minister Chinh are as follows:
- Reviewing legal documents to identify bottlenecks in the administrative system.
- Overhauling administrative procedures at all levels to facilitate production and business activities, and improve the livelihoods of the people.
- Examining personnel to recognize and commend those who fulfill their duties, while taking appropriate actions against those who underperform, following the Party and State’s regulations.
Prime Minister Chinh urged the steering committee members and leaders of ministries, sectors, and localities to consider administrative reform as a focal task and a criterion for assessing the performance of officials, civil servants, and public employees. He also stressed the importance of agency leaders’ sense of responsibility towards administrative reform and emphasized the need to expedite the resolution of issues faced by the public and enterprises.
The Prime Minister further assigned specific tasks to certain ministries and sectors, expressing his belief that administrative reform, especially in conjunction with digital transformation, will be promoted to effectively carry out political and socio-economic tasks in 2023 and beyond.
Since 2021, ministries and ministry-level agencies in Vietnam have successfully cut or streamlined 2,352 business-related rules specified in 191 legal documents. They have also implemented plans to abolish or simplify an additional 470 rules in 56 documents. The digitization of administrative procedures has seen progress, with 31.16% of the results of the settlement of administrative procedures available in electronic versions, and 66.48% of administrative procedure dossiers being digitalized.
Furthermore, the public service portals and electronic single-window information systems of 62 out of 63 localities, along with 10 out of 21 ministries and sectors, have been merged into ministry- and provincial-level information systems for handling administrative procedures, which have also been integrated with the National Public Service Portal. These steps indicate Vietnam’s commitment to enhancing administrative efficiency and service delivery to its citizens and businesses.