The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The $30m project to transform the government's digital/IT infrastructure was yesterday branded "one of the most revolutionary things that has happened in the country for decades".

Jeffrey Beckles, pictured, the Chamber of Commerce's chief executive, told Tribune Business that the the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) funded project would have "a huge impact" on the "millions of man hours" Bahamian businesses lose every year due to their employees having to stand in-line at government agencies while on corporate and personal business.

Speaking as the government and IDB officially launched the project's operational phase, Mr Beckles said that while "long overdue" it will ultimately place all public services on an "integrated online platform" that can be easily accessed by citizens and businesses alike.

He added that, if executed properly, it will boost The Bahamas' economic competitiveness and "ease of doing business" through the elimination of bureaucratic manual processes that government agencies have relied upon for years.

While individual agencies, such as Customs and now the National Insurance Board (NIB), have embraced technology to provide solutions that both aid customers and improve compliance, the IDB-financed project aims to pull this together across all public sector agencies so that service delivery is modernised and becomes fit for the 21st century economy.

Mr Beckles said yesterday's announcement that passport renewal applications can now be made online, due to the combined efforts of the Passport Office and the government's Department for Transformation and Digitisation, had given the private sector "a lot of confidence" that the wider project is for real and can work.

"It's going to be a huge, huge, huge, huge positive impact," Mr Beckles told Tribune Business of the IDB-funded initiative. "I think it's going to be one of the most revolutionary things that has happened in the country for decades.

"One, it makes accessing services a lot easier. It's going to cut down on frustration and time. It's going to cut down on losing productivity when you have to send people to stand online from government agency to government agency.

"A lot of people don't calculate the cost of the lost man hours with our current system. I think that if you add up those man hours throughout the private sector you'll find that seven million man hours are lost standing on lines. These things have a quantifiable impact for businesses," the chamber chief continued.

"For the average citizen, they will be able to go online and access government services without all the headaches experienced in the past. From a business standpoint it will have a tremendous positive impact on expense and the bottom line."

Mr Beckles said Bahamian companies suffered greatly from lost productivity when employees had to wait for the likes of driver's licence and passport renewals, plus birth and marriage certificates. "Now, they have the ability to do that online, and all that lost productivity goes away," he added.

"Businesses will now have greater ability to interact with government. Look at the ease of doing business. It goes to our whole rating. Potential investors will say: 'Wow'. They're easy to do business with'. A lot of things hinge on that. One agency at a time, eventually they'll all be integrated to where government is seen as a functional government because it's an integrated platform."

The chamber chief said the joint IDB/government team that will steer the public sector-wide modernisation conceded during yesterday's presentation that the effort was "long overdue", and that it had started late, but delivered the message that "we're no longer procrastinating but getting things done".

"Obviously the task ahead is quite significant, but the presentation on what has already been done gives a lot of confidence and hope to us in the private sector," Mr Beckles added, describing the ability to apply for passport renewals online as "a giant step forward in the right direction".

"In the first instance the customer is the taxpayer, and it was very good to see them put the needs of customers as top priority," he said.

The IDB highlighted just how far behind The Bahamas was lagging in adopting modern, efficient and technology-based methods for delivering public services and interacting with taxpayers when it first unveiled the $30m project in early 2018.

Revealing that registering a company in The Bahamas was then "four times' costlier" than in developed countries, with less than three per cent of government procedures able to be completed online, the IDB report warned that stifling red tape "increases the opportunities for corruption".

It added that the government suffered from "a silo culture" where just four out of 18 agencies were equipped to properly exchange information due to a paper-dominated system, while officials were "inadequately trained" to offer services that focused on citizen and business needs. The Ministry of Public Service's $150,000 training budget enabling it to assist just 200 civil servants - only one per cent of the total - per year.

The IDB subsequently revealed that more than 40,000 tax payments in 2017 were made manually, highlighting how far the government and private sector have to travel to achieve true digital or e-government.

Despite filing and payment requirements for all three taxes being available online, data disclosed by the IDB showed that 9,554 VAT payments; 7,592 business license fee payments; and 24,019 real property tax payments were not made digitally. Some 1,308 business registrations were also done manually, or "in person".

The IDB report showed it was a similar tale at other key government agencies, such as the Registrar General's Department, National Insurance Board (NIB) and Road Traffic Department - all of which dealt with between 50,000 to upwards of 60,000 transactions for key services manually in 2017, despite many of them being available online.

However, KP Turnquest, deputy prime minister, yesterday told Tribune Business that the launch presentation showed that "some of our regional counterparts are behind us" when it came to digital government.

"We're not doing terrible, but are not doing excellent either," he said. "When you look at the way business is being done around the world, if we want to maintain our competitive position we have to find ways to be more efficient and more effective in service delivery and reduce the cost of doing business. This is very important to our overall economic growth and retaining existing market share."