Pandemic accelerates the offer of digital public services, which already exceed 3,400; see examples

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With the new coronavirus pandemic holding citizens at home and restricting access to face-to-face services, public bodies had to speed up processes and expand digitization on their platforms. Today, there are more than 3,400 digital services offered to the population.

The availability of time, savings in transport and document printing, in addition to avoiding hours in queues, are factors that contribute to greater adherence of the population to digital services offered by public agencies.

According to the federal government, 72% of the 4,847 services available on the gov.br platform are fully digital. Of these, 1,558 services have been digitized since January 2019. During the pandemic, 985 services were made available for online access — since March 2020.

According to Caio Mario Paes de Andrade, Special Secretary for Debureaucratization, Management and Digital Government, the digitization of services has generated savings of BRL 3.1 billion since January 2019. Of this amount, BRL 2.3 billion came from pockets population, which also saved time and money. The remainder, about R$ 800 million, corresponds to savings in public coffers.

The digital transformation is evident in the numbers. According to the government, in January 2019 the gov.br platform had 1.8 million registered users. In November of this year, this number reached 117 million. Much of this progress was due to the offer of services such as Emergency Aid, Digital Proof of Life, Digital Traffic and Work Wallets, offered on the platform.

At Poupatempo, an agency of the São Paulo government to facilitate the population’s access to public services, the pandemic also accelerated digitalization.

“In March 2020, at Poupatempo stations, we had five digital services through the portal or application. Today we have 168. They are conclusive services, which do not require a face-to-face return. They have services that only exist on the digital platform”, says Murilo Macedo, director of Poupatempo.

“It’s the only good legacy the pandemic has left us: the digitization of the world.”

According to the agency, in November, the most searched service of all features was scoring on the CNH (National Driver’s License), driven by the new points rule, which came into effect in April 2020, and the reopening of the Detran calendar, released in early November.

The vaccination card, one of the most recent services on the platform, had 7 million hits in November, according to Macedo.

The same advance in digitalization is seen in the City of São Paulo. Today, 560 digital services are offered, 100 of which were included as of March 2020. The Emergency Basic Income service alone had 935,274 requests.

Another point highlighted with digitalization was the agility of the processes, reports Gilson Albioni, director of Ciga (Consortium of Informatics in Municipal Public Management). Created in 2007, the consortium brings together 329 municipalities in 12 states.

“Cities that used to take 1,600 hours to open a company, for example, can now do it in two hours. A combination of digitization with process improvement”, says Albioni, who highlights single access as an advantage.

“Cities embarked on a very significant ride for the country, which was single access. The federal government provides a unified login that city halls can use. Thus, citizens do not need to create a password for the city hall. With gov.br they uses state and county services.”

What also convinces the citizen is the availability of the service. “You no longer have a fixed schedule. For example, you no longer have the obligation to go to the bank at a certain time, as you can do the service for 24 hours”, says Wallace Sartori Bonfim, professor of IT courses and coordinator of the Fábrica de Software from the University Center of João Pessoa (PB).

Both public agencies and experts interviewed by the report emphasize that data security is a challenge. report of leaf showed that data from millions of Brazilians are sold for R$200 by criminals on the internet.

“The way in which this data can be used is a great concern. A person can, for example, register at a popular pharmacy to receive government funds”, says Claudio Machado, a specialist in Citizen Identity Management and an independent consultant.

“Brazil has a data transfer policy, one agency gives it to another. Inappropriate sharing will only change with a secure civil identification system. One agency doesn’t need to give the data to another.”

The federal government says it has been working to avoid exposing user data. “The Digital Government Secretariat promotes a set of actions to encourage measures to increase cybersecurity and data protection, as well as accelerate the evolution of the maturity necessary for federal agencies and entities to comply with the LGPD (General Protection Law). We launched 12 operational guides with guidelines and examples of good practices on the subject, which are already available on gov.br”, says secretary Caio Mario.

The difficulty of access also ends up being an obstacle. According to a survey on internet usage and browsing habits carried out by Instituto Locomotiva and Idec (Instituto de Defesa do Consumidor), a quarter of the Brazilian population is without internet for one week a month because of the exhaustion of mobile phone plans. .

In addition, there are also locations where the internet signal does not reach. According to the ICT Household survey, released in August 2020 by Cetic.br (Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society), 83% of Brazilian homes have internet access.

“We live in large centers. When we look a little further, we think of an Amazon, in places within the states that are close to us and that we do not have access to. The internet reaching these places, in whatever form, will be a great benefit” , says Professor Wallace Sartori Bonfim.

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