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Eight out of ten Romanians say that the problem they go with does not get resolved during the first visit to a public institution, given that 70% of tax payers are forced to take a day off in order to solve problems regarding interaction with the state, according to a recent study done by the Romanian Association for Smart City, with the support of Dell Technologies.
On the list of obstacles that the Romanian people have to deal with at the counter is the fact that they did not have all their documents (47.03%) and technical or human errors within the institution (46.85%).
According to the same study, 6 out of 10 Romanians believe that Romania is an excessively bureaucratized country.
Among the interactions they had with the state institutions in the past, 35.9% of respondents say that neither of these took place in the digital space, 21.89% declaring that only one interaction took place online and 16.93% had two interactions in which they were not required to go in person.
Furthermore, the majority of those questions are not giving a lot of chances to a full digitization of state administrative institutions in the near future. Thus, 27.87% consider that this will take place in 10 years, 22.68% in 5 years, while 20.63% believe that digitization will not happen at all.
"The conclusions are worrying, given that 88.66% of Romanians are used to interacting with state institutions for paying taxes and levies, and 67.01% for obtaining or renewing official documents," the authors of the study say.
Another survey carried out by the Romanian Association for Smart City consulted the opinion of state representatives regarding the degree of digitization in public institutions.
According to the research, the main identified need by respondents is transparency (in processes and their duration), highlighting the fact that "a record of the documents' circuit would be necessary", followed by data connection and communication between institutions. Also, 63% of respondents, done in 27 public institutions, declared that they take their information about the technological evolution directly from the workplace.
Furthermore, 85% of those questioned indicated that the priority of digitization should also be about accessibility and improvement of the infrastructure (quick access to resources), one of the most important solutions for simplifying Romanian bureaucracy being the use of Cloud solutions. Despite all this, from the total number of respondents, only 22% say that they use this type of storage solution, although 78% consider that it would significantly improve efficiency.
The Romanian Association for Smart City, along with Dell Technologies, have started a campaign for Romania's digitization - "Romania without counters" - whose objective is removing bureaucracy from the state institutions by implementing technological solutions adapted to the needs of the citizens.
