Data sharing is crucial for e-government

Applicants conducting registration procedures for their vehicles. On the national scale, it needs a policy and a legal corridor for data sharing with electronic identification. (Photo: Saigon Times)

In 2016, around 3.5 million messages were sent online every minute. In 2017, the figure shot to 15 million. Every minute, Uber receives 50,000 ride orders through messages, Google records 3.6 million searches and the Internet receives 100 million e-mail spams. Some 3.7 billion Internet users create 2.5 million gigabytes of data per minute and the number increases exponentially. This phenomenon is called “Data never sleeps 5.0,” as the data is shared globally.

A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc inaugurated the “National E-document Exchange Platform,” a further progress in the e-government program. Earlier, documents were sent by post and it took a week or more to reach the receiver, but with the platform now it’s just a matter of seconds. It provides extremely great convenience, especially in the communication between government agencies and local authorities, as well as immense benefits for citizens and enterprises.

Just imagine that over the next five years, government documents, including scanned and copied versions of all documents that had been issued before the birth of the national e-document exchange platform, will be available on servers. 

However, data will be useless if they are not used or shared for development purposes. In the age of Industry 4.0, data must be considered property. Consequently, the property must be bought, sold and shared; and there are public property, private property, public-private property, and secured as well as unsecured property. The database on the platform is the same.

After the inauguration of the platform, the Government’s Office, the Ministry of Information and Communications, the World Bank and the Australian Agency for International Development (Ausaid) held two workshops on crucial issues for the digital ecology of the e-government in Vietnam, namely data sharing and electronic identification, to recommend the Government build a legal framework. The technology architecture or platform for data creation is quite easy, the legal framework is more difficult, but the modus operandi and mindset change is really a tough challenge. Both Vietnamese and international speakers talked about the necessity of a clear policy regarding what to share, how to share, what to secure and who is who in the process of accessing the database, public and top-secret alike.

In Vietnam, many databases are considered private property. The Vietnam Insurance Agency has more than 80 million notes on personal information of insurees. The Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs has the same number of notes on personal information in its server. The number at the Ministry of Public Security is smaller. The Ministry of Transport has the curriculum vitae of all drivers. However, the personal information of a person in the databases of these agencies is different, as they have different methods of information collection for different management purposes.

A few days ago, the author of this article went to the tax office to pay the registration tax for my car and then brought the tax invoice to the registration office at 86 Ly Thuong Kiet Street in Hanoi. The staff there typed the information all over again, and narrowly made an error on the frame number. He wished that the information about the car would be available online after the tax office has collected the registration tax. The staff at the registration office would only have to scan the QR code to know the name of the car owner, the car information and the tax payment. Nevertheless, the e-government in Vietnam is just halfway online, as the information is not shared between the tax office and the registration office.

Full electronic transactions are available only when information like names, birth dates and addresses is shared or co-used by many agencies. The e-government at present is only halfway, as it is implemented separately at a number of government agencies.

At a meeting on traffic safety last month, Transport Minister Nguyen Van The was quoted by the media: “We propose that drivers who lose driving licenses have to take the driving test again to avoid the situation of abusing the second or third license for business operations.” The statement has instantly sparked fierce controversy on the press and social media. The fact that a driver may have quite a few driving licenses is true, as it is a way to cope with traffic police who can revoke the license of heavy offenders. The reason for the license revocation is simple: The agency which issues the driving license and the traffic police do not have a common database. Traffic offenders know this loophole, and so they can cite various reasons for “losing the driving license” at the license issuing agency. Minister The wanted to prevent this fraud but did not state clearly, thus causing controversy on the media.

The law is not strict and confusion reigns because of the power overlapping and the practice of keeping data for oneself. The story of lack of data sharing between the driving license issuing agency and the traffic police reveals a small problem that should be solved to help the transport ministry prevent frauds in driving tests.

On the national scale, it needs a policy and a legal corridor for data sharing with electronic identification. This is a solution for development in the Internet age of “Data never sleeps 5.0.”