The World Bank New-Economy Sector Study Electronic Government and Governance: Lessons for Argentina Paper Prepared by Roberto Panzardi
The Electronic Network of Municipalities
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- Social and Fiscal National Identification System Program (SINTyS)
- The Agora Platform and Other Sources of Information to Legislation
The Electronic Network of MunicipalitiesThis initiative is being managed by the Under-secretariat for Municipal Affairs – Ministry of the Interior, with financial assistance provided by the IADB, under Project 1164/OC AR – Programa de Reformas y Desarrollo de los Municipios Argentinos. The objectives of this project are:
Among its activities, this initiative intends to digitalize the participating municipalities, train the public officials, provide management applications, and include the municipalities in internet. The project started in December 1998 and is expected to be concluded by December 2004. At the time the mission visited Argentina (March 2002), the officials appointed at ONTI by the Duhalde administration had not established working contacts with this project. They see this initiative as overlapping with the Civitas component of PSI. One individual project on municipal digitalization (Mar del Plata Ciudad Digital), which expects to receive support from this initiative, will be reviewed in detail in the next chapter of this study. Social and Fiscal National Identification System Program (SINTyS)The Social and Fiscal National Identification System (SINTyS) was created on July 13, 1998, with a view to its eventual institutionalization. It will introduce the use of a single national identifier for people and legal entities, based on the three main existing identifiers: the social security identifier (CUIL), the tax administration identifier (CUIT) and the national identifier (DNI). With a World Bank US$54M loan, the Government launched the first phase of the project in 1999. Its object is to identify social and/or fiscal attributes of physical and legal persons in Argentina, through a sustainable information exchange system, aimed at improving the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of social services and fiscal programs at all levels of government in Argentina. Upon completion of the project in eight years, barriers to information exchange among participating agencies will have disappeared as information gathered separately becomes available, when and where needed and legally available, through a shared information exchange network, enabling Government to offer “one-stop” delivery of multiple value-added and more equitable services. Other actions supported by the project would include a number of legal framework provisions. There is already in Argentina’s Congress a proposed overall confidentiality and privacy of information law, which would fit in very well with SINTyS’ needs. It is expected that SINTyS will participate in its regulation. In addition, legal provisions will be needed to govern the interchange of data by participating agencies, the legitimization of SINTyS for facilitating its functioning, oversee its regulation, and to set standards for and conduct verification of its quality and performance. In Phase III, provisions would be made for SINTyS’ long term institutionalization. The project’s expected benefits are improved targeting of programs to the socially disadvantaged segments of society; reduction in social expenditures through more efficient delivery of services; increases in social security contributions; increases in revenues due to more efficient and effective tax evasion detection and fraud mitigation; provision of value-added services through the institutional framework and infrastructure, including better information for decision- and policy-making and for program planning. The direct beneficiaries of the project in the first instance would be program managers and government officials in charge of social programs and tax, health, judicial and pension administration at federal and provincial levels, for whom the project would be an instrument to improve the management and effectiveness of their respective programs via better targeting and/or the reduction of fraud and leakage’s. The indirect beneficiary of the project is in general the public through fairer tax burdens because of reduced tax evasion and potential future increases in social and other public programs. In particular, beneficiaries would be those who should be covered by social programs but are not. This would have a positive impact in terms of poverty alleviation, although no estimate exists of this potential effect. It should be noted that women and children are likely to account for a significant share of the poor who should qualify for social programs but do not at present receive assistance. The Agora Platform and Other Sources of Information to LegislationThe Argentine Chamber of Deputies is currently developing the Agora connectivity project, which aims at providing safe, private and permanent communications to the various bodies of Congress through a high-speed network that will enable digital traffic of data, audio and images among its users. Additionally, it will act as a network with Internet. The scheme will register all events occurred in the Chamber, permitting the auditing of the legislative process by the citizenry. The internet connection will be protected with a Firewall/Proxy security scheme. This will allow citizen scrutiny of parliamentary life but the external access will be restricted to avoid interference by intruders. Other than the Agora project, there have been in Argentina other initiatives that enabled the development of websites with legislative information. These are:
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