During the public debate, the Institute Alternative submitted written comments, suggestions and proposals to the Ministry of Public Administration, with the aim of improving the Draft Law on Electronic Government.
The Draft Law’s key problems are failures to specify certain provisions and to impose appropriate sanctions, imprecise formulations and inconsistencies, which can limit the positive effect of new solutions.
There must be an obligation of authorities to update the electronic services data in timely manner and align the description of the provision of those services with the new Administrative Procedure Act. In this regard, it is necessary to prescribe deadlines for updating data on individual electronic services as well as to introduce sanctions for incorrect or incomplete information on electronic services.
Furthermore, we suggested that the principle on discrimination prevention needs to be further elaborated and accompanied by the adequate sanction for disrespect of this principle.
The Draft Law does not prescribe the obligation of local administration bodies to exchange data through a unified electronic data exchange system. This solution threatens the efficiency of providing all services that include contact and exchange of data with local administration bodies, so we think that these bodies should have the same obligation as state administration bodies.
It is necessary to specify the provision which leaves the possibility for state authorities to ‘whenever the character of their work permits them’, they are free of obligation to exchange data from electronic registers and information systems through a single electronic data exchange system.
In order to provide better efficiency in service provision for the citizens, we propose setting a deadline within which two bodies must exchange data through a single electronic data exchange system.
We paid special attention to the planned meta-register, which, according to this Draft, includes only electronic registers but not all registers owned by the obligors of the Law. We have similar remarks to the decision to establish a catalogue of electronic services, but not a catalogue of all administrative services. Therefore, it is impossible to assess which services can be re-designed into an electronic format and we remain without a baseline situation, which can provide a better insight into potential directions of improving public services.
We also proposed erasing a provision, which predicts the establishment of the Council for Electronic Administration; if this body is still retained, we suggest that it includes representatives of the NGO sector.
Special problem is the unclear jurisdiction over the Law enforcement. Regarding this, the proposal of the Institute Alternative is to distinctly distinguish the responsibilities of the Administrative Inspectorate and the competencies of the inspectors for information society services in such a way that the supervision over the submission of data on electronic registers and information systems to the competent authority and on other (technical) issues will be carried out by an information society inspector, while supervision of the exchange of data will be carried out ex officio by the Administrative Inspectorate.
Additionally, we consider that the deadline of 60 days for the submission of data on new registers or information systems is not proportionate to the scope of the work that this information exchange implies, and needs to be shortened.
