Santo Domingo. – Since October 4, when President Abinader launched the Zero Bureaucracy program, which seeks to streamline and make bureaucratic processes more efficient. More than 305 procedures and services of different state institutions are available to the business community and citizens in general, through the Single Citizen Attention Portal gob.do.
To these services are added “1,228 informative procedures, through the Single State Portal, together with the one-stop shops for health, business formalization, construction, investment, and with the commitment from the Zero Bureaucracy Program that in the coming years all State procedures will be integrated”, announced the President.
“Much of the corruption in Latin America, Asia and Africa is due to an excess of government regulations”, according to a World Bank study cited by Andrés Oppenheimer (2019).
According to this publication, in countries with more regulations people have to pay more bribes and there is more corruption: “they force the rich to bribe public officials, and condemn the poor to work in informality, outside the legal framework of their countries”.
The Dominican Government has begun the process of transforming the Public Administration, and President Abinader affirmed that this initiative has a positive impact on the transparency of the processes and allows measuring their productivity, while motivating all public institutions to continue implementing the actions framed in Zero Bureaucracy, and those that are not yet part of it, to join the action.
The program reduces the response times of the procedures involved by more than 40%, thanks to their simplification and automation, and reduces the requirements by integrating them into the single interoperability platform, which facilitates the exchange of data and information between public institutions.
In the first phase, the population will be able to digitally perform more than 305 transactional and interactive procedures and services of multiple public institutions in an agile, fast and simple way, and obtain updated information on those of an informative nature; in addition, the single windows of health, business formalization, construction and investment will be integrated, and thus users who access through the portal will be redirected to these.
This platform was designed using accessibility and usability criteria to facilitate citizen interaction and provide a comprehensive user experience that facilitates the delivery of services to citizens.
In addition, the integration of Bureaucracy Zero to the single interoperability platform facilitates the exchange of data and information between public institutions, which, together with the repository of documents and files, will facilitate the reduction of requirements and requests by the same institutions, reducing time, resources and efforts under an ethical framework of personal data protection and cybersecurity.
The program contemplates the implementation of the Zero Travel Project in Santiago, as a collection center for the Northern region, and then extend to other important economic centers of the country, which will allow channeling business procedures and services that are not yet incorporated into the Single Services Portal and that are only performed in the capital in person.
A regulation will also be sent for public consultation to reduce to zero the time required for sanitary registration processes for products endorsed by the FDA in the United States and the EMA in Europe.
The second phase foresees the integration of the single registry for regulatory improvement, which will allow people to know the regulations with which they must comply, participate in the processes of elaboration of new administrative regulations and public consultations.
In addition, the platform will have a universal citizen authentication component, which will allow biometric validation of users, adding a new layer of security in the provision of services and data protection.
This initiative fulfills the mandate of Law 167-21 on Regulatory Improvement and Simplification of Procedures, whose purpose is to “define and articulate public policies aimed at regulatory improvement and simplification of administrative procedures” (art. 1), and is framed within the Digital Transformation Agenda of the Dominican Republic 2030, and the National Competitiveness Strategy.
The Zero Bureaucracy Program, created by Decree No. 640-20, seeks to increase the efficiency of public administration through clear, timely and transparent regulatory frameworks that allow for the simplification of procedures and services, as well as the improvement of the quality of regulations.
