After the inclusion of the municipalities of Sofado in Thessaly and South Corfu, the municipalities that have the ability to provide digital services to their citizens through the gov.gr environment now number two hundred.

“The Ministry of Digital Governance and the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE) utilize digital tools for the benefit of citizens, while at the same time working towards the reduction of bureaucracy and faster service” emphasized the Minister of Digital Governance, Dimitris Papastergiou.

Communicating with the relevant municipalities through the digital boxes of gov.gr offers citizens the opportunity to follow the progress of their request from the application to its processing, while for the public administration the volume of documents in paper form is reduced and limited the bureaucracy, as the Ministry of Digital Governance states in its relevant announcement.

In addition, according to the relevant information, both for citizens and for the public services of the two hundred municipalities that have joined gov.gr, transactions are progressing in the direction of acceleration and simplification. Specifically, according to the Department of Digital Governance, the following changes:

What changes for the citizens?

  • Citizens can now apply digitally through gov.gr for services that until now required their physical presence, such as the Certificate of Permanent Residence or the Civil Marriage License.
  • The application is made in a simple way: the citizen connects to the Taxisnet codes and submits the application electronically to the desired Municipality. After the completion of the process, the certificate/certificate is sent electronically to the citizen’s inbox, who is simultaneously notified by SMS and email to save or print the document via my.gov.gr. The copy incorporates all security features (QR Code, Security Code, Advanced Electronic Seal) and can be presented for any legal use.
  • Services that up to now the citizen could request electronically from the KEPs, such as for example notarial acts before 2013, are now served directly by the municipalities as a result of the drastic reduction of the waiting time for the citizen and the need to transfer them to the KEPs, reducing at the same time the workload of the human resources that staff them.
  • Finally, services provided by the KEPs with a physical presence which required two visits (one for the application and one for receiving the certificate), are now served in one visit since the certificate is sent digitally by the municipality to the citizen’s personal mailbox ( my.gov.gr).

What is changing for public administration?

For municipal executives, gov.gr Mailboxes offer 4 basic functions that save time and offer greater efficiency:

  • Reception and processing of citizens’ requests from gov.gr, with a reply to the Citizen’s Mailbox.
  • Issuance of certificates of competence of municipalities without the need for physical or electronic signatures and seals of the municipality. These certificates have the security features of gov.gr, are valid in physical as well as in digital form and are mandatorily accepted by the Public Administration and by private entities.
  • Independent search and issuance of certificates that are necessary in municipal procedures, so that citizens are not asked to present them.
  • Acceptance of applications through the country’s KEPs with a reply to the Citizen’s Mailbox.

To date, the municipalities have served 226,939 cases of their citizens, through the gov.gr Mailboxes. Specifically:

  • 174,362 cases, following a citizen’s request from gov.gr to the municipality.
  • 15,966 cases using the Boxes for online certificate issuance when the citizen is present in person at the service of the municipality.
  • 36,611 cases, following a citizen’s request in a KEP to the municipality, using the gov.gr boxes.

Citizens can find out about the Municipalities that have joined gov.gr at the link: https://aitiseis-dhmoi.services.gov.gr/dhmoi/

The planning, development and management of the services is carried out by the General Secretariat of Information Systems & Digital Governance of the Ministry of Digital Governance and the National Network of Technology and Research Infrastructures (EDYTE SA – GRNET), with the support of the Ministry of the Interior and KEDE, while the goal is to gradually digitize new procedures that will become available to citizens.