Communication Team Member of the New Patriotic Party(NPP), Paul Amaning says government’s successful digitization drive is not only ensuring efficient delivery of public services, it is also contributing significantly to the fight against corruption in the public sector.
He noted that one of the reasons for embarking on a vigorous digitization drive is to reduce human contact in public service delivery in order to considerably minimise the risk of bribery and corruption in the system.
“Our approach to improving the delivery of public services is to minimize human contact as much as possible. Therefore, we embarked on an aggressive digitalization of the processes of service delivery across many public institutions with coordination from my office.”
The digitization process, he noted, has made a significant impact on efficient public service delivery, boosted revenue and also helped in the fight against corruption in many sectors.
Paul Amaning provided detailed accounts, with figures, to prove how the minimised human contact through digitization, has reduced corruption and significantly boosted the government’s revenue mobilization at the DVLA, ports, passport office, motor insurance, etc.
At the passport office for instance, he revealed that digitization of the passport application process has resulted in less human contact and a major increase in the number of passports processed annually as well as the revenue yield to the passport office.
“Digitization has dealt a severe blow to corruption at the Passport Office,” Paul Amaning added.
At the ports, Paul Amaning also recounted how previously, the bureaucratic processes in the clearing of goods involved a lot of paperwork, delays, corruption, inefficiencies, frustrations, and loss of revenue to the government.