Ministry of Transport, Information Technology and Communications

"People should be able to have access to administrative services from their personal computers. This will be possible via the Internet. There, people will be guided towards the service needed as well as where and how to receive it. The services must be offered in a user-friendly fashion by having the same outlook so that a new culture of interacting with the administration can be created. These are our short-term goals," said Minister Tsvetkov.

The e-Governance pilot platform will be accessible initially with 14 services offered by local and central administrations. The goal is to create a transparent process and to allow users to leave comments - everybody will be able to see the changes as well as to give suggestions, noted Minister Tsvetkov. He demonstrated how two of the e-services can be used for under 5 minutes.

One of the services demonstrated - verification of permanent address - was used via regular administrative channels about 180 000 times in 2008. The initial estimated savings from using the electronic services in all local administrations are significant - around 1.8 million leva. Along with this, the time that will be spent for using the service will be lowered from two hours to five-ten minutes.

Until the end of the year, we expect to integrate and publicize 100 more e-services and additional 100 until the second half of 2011, the Minister said.

In the past 4 months, the MTITC team analyzed the actions of the previous administrations responsible for the introduction of the e-Government in Bulgaria. Until the completion of the audit, all payments related to the previous administrations' actions are frozen. Regardless of what is spent, we will insist upon the alignment of the requirements with the technical specifications, Aleksandar Tsvetkov underlined.

In addition to the audit, MTITC created the Council of Registering, which implemented the basic methodologies and instructions and began registering various services. Coordination between the contracts' executors and the team unit from the Ministry has been established. The financial budget for the next year and a half has been prepared and submitted. In February, the final concept for the development of the e-Governance will be completed. The document will then be up for public discussion.

For additional information:
Emilia Philcheva, Press Centre,
Ministry of Transport, Information Technology
and Communications
Phone: + 359 2  940 94 34
E-Mail: ephilcheva@mtitc.government.bg