1.1 Audit findings and opinions
From 2001 to 2016, the Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau (hereinafter referred as “SAFP” according to Portuguese abbreviation) drew up four planning documents for the electronic governance development, and there were 61 projects available to be investigated. After the audit, CA found that until 31 December 2016, only 39 of them were completed, accounting for 63.93%, which represented the low implementation rate. For the 22 uncompleted projects, 16 had been proposed for more than 10 years and still unfinished.
SAFP indicated that its responsibilities did not include planning and coordinating the implementation of electronic governance before its reorganization in 2011, but it agreed that there were deficiencies in the execution of the planned projects. For example, many of projects did not set a timetable or those with a timetable but failed to complete on schedule, because the initial development plan for electronic governance was only a strategic plan or a guiding document, which did not undergo an in-depth study and was formulated without the practical experience of pilot program. After reviewing the work in past years, SAFP found that it was necessary to enhance its functions of study, coordination and supporting in the implementation of electronic governance. Therefore, between 2010 and 2014, SAFP reinforced its functions through reorganization, and solved the related problems by conducting fundamental studies, implementing pilot programs, drawing up internal work plans and adjusting the content and schedule of the plan. However, according to SAFP Organic Law, which came into effect in 1994, it already had the responsibility to promote the modernization of public administration before its reorganization. Meanwhile, in 2001, an inter-departmental working group was established by the order of the Secretary for Administration and Justice to coordinate the electronic governance works among government departments, in which the Director of SAFP served as the coordinator. Therefore, SAFP has responsibility to promote and implement the electronic governance both before and after its reorganization. Moreover, the audit result also shows that although SAFP pointed out that it only took the responsibility for planning and coordinating electronic governance after its reorganization in 2011, however, over the years, electronic governance works still have remained in the initial stage, or implemented as pilot programs to gain experience. Thus the reason for the slow implementation progress of electronic governance is understandable.
For the personnel management system and the ePass developed by SAFP, the audit result indicates that the personnel management modules proposed in 2001, namely the "Application system of public sector vacation leave", the "Collection system of public human resources data" and the "Enrollment system of public training courses" were developed in a reckless way, without basic analysis; as a result, there were fundamental problems related to the security of human resources data and their transmission through the network; therefore the "Application system of public sector vacation leave" was not put into operation until the technologies were mature enough to solve these problems in 2010. For the other two systems, they were available to departments in 2015 after developing for 13 years. Moreover, SAFP did not consult the users’ needs during the development of personnel management system, so it was not able to provide comprehensive personnel data for the expenditure system to settle the employees’ monthly salary. In addition, after the system put into operation, SAFP did not timely follow-up the users’ experience (SAFP regarded the experience as a trial process) to make adjustment by the users’ proposed amendment, causing the failure of system to satisfy the needs of departments in respect of daily personnel management and the settlement of monthly expenditure, and ultimately affecting the utilization of personnel management system. Until 31 December 2016, among 97 public departments, only 22 of them were using this system, which accounted for 22.68%, clearly failing to meet the target of reducing the re-development of systems and sharing the resources. On the other hand, the digitalization of internal personnel management procedures was proposed in 2006. According to the information provided by SAFP, a total of 18 forms in the Legal System of Public Service were planned to be converted into electronic forms. However, by the end of 2016, there was only one form ─ “Absence and annual leave application form”, completed this transition. On this matter, SAFP explained that the factors, such as the usage frequency, the need to optimize the process and the prioritizing of projects, were taken into consideration. However, the work of transforming into electronic form mainly involves the intranet of department, and it does not involve the security problem of external data transmission, showing that the efficiency of SAFP in promoting the electronic governance was extremely low, and the results it achieved were minimal since only one form was completed the transition after developing for more than 10 years.
Regarding to the ePass, SAFP launched it in November 2009 and aimed to allow citizens to use the online public services provided by different departments through one single account. However, due to the reckless planning of service targets, ePass has only applied to Macao residents aged 18 or above, excluding non-residents and organizations / institutions. Besides, since SAFP failed to enact the corresponding laws to regulate ePass, there might be a problem of legal validity in the verification of user identity and the application made through ePass. As a result, until 31 December 2016, only seven departments provided services, mainly enquiry service, on the ePass platform, and the number of registered ePass users was low.
In addition, although SAFP revised the ePass in 2012 due to its issues and proposed a study for a unified identification mechanism, and set the deadlines for creating the mechanism in the planning guidelines of different periods; however SAFP failed to implement all this work. After that, SAFP put forward to formulate the relative laws and regulations in 2017 Policy Address and expected that it would be completed in 2018, but the actual completion date remains to be seen. Therefore, the problems related to the service targets and legal validity remained unsolved and failed to achieve the goal of ePass.
It is worth noting that when SAFP answered the questions raised up by CA in June 2018, it pointed out that the application platform of government positions as a pilot project had already applied the unified identification mechanism in its design. In fact, the unified identification mechanism needs to have a holistic consideration of three part, i.e. electronic account, smart identity card and “electronic certificate”, and standardize their application in the electronic governance. Whereas the laws regulating the access to government positions only have legal effect on the conduct of submitting application for government positions in an electronic way. Therefore, the problem of lack of legal effect in ePass remained unsolved. Moreover, during the on-site audit, the head of department of electronic government affairs already indicated that the application platform of government positions did not implement the unified identification mechanism. In response to this, SAFP pointed out that if there is discrepancy between the statements made by its staff and the authority, the statement of authority should prevail.
1.2 Audit suggestions
SAFP should:
Draw up a practicable plan and implement the government policy with the main objective of achieving the overall aim of administrative modernization, and during the process, it should carefully consider and identify some key problems, such as the specific aims, the conditions and limitations existed in the actual circumstances and the ways to achieve the aims.
Ensure the systems it developed not only can satisfy the basic requirement of departments, but also can enable them to create additional functions. Besides, SAFP should simplify the operation of existing systems and make them user-friendly in order to make them more attractive and convenient to use in the long term.
Ensure that the establishment of projects should be equipped with all the necessary conditions for their implementation, such as the technical conditions, the provision of resources and the corresponding laws and set a reasonable execution period.
