SCM Working Group Helsinki Meeting

On 20 September 2003, the SCM Network working Group meeting was held in Helsinki, Finland. More than 30 delegates attended for this meeting, which included for the first time, delegates from Croatia. The meeting was opened by the Hon. Janne Metsamaki, the Finnish State Secretary responsible for reducing Administrative Burdens. He stated that the Finnish Government has committed itself to avoid both increasing the costs incurred for and adding to the regulatory burden on the industry through its decisions. 

Even though there is no reason to feel pleased about the economic downturn in the Euro area, Hon. Metsamaki said that this situation has brought the bureaucracy experienced by businesses in Finland into greater focus in public debate. Politicians cannot afford to weaken the operating conditions of companies with excessive bureaucracy. He mentioned that the one good thing that will come out of this downturn in economic activity is that policy-makers are now better equipped to make decisions with a genuine impact on reducing the burden on businesses.

The meeting discussed the various initiatives that are being implemented in a number of Member States when it comes to the development of eGovernment for the various services being offered by Government Entities to the business community and the citizens.

Gerald Reindl explained how in Austria, they have introduced the Austrian Business Service Portal. This a central eGov one-stop-shop for businesses which will provide information and transactions, enable businesses to have an efficient administrative procedures with the Federal Government while at the same time cutting costs of up to € 300 million.

Janek Rozov presented the Estonian case of their development of a Register of Economic Activities. The objective of this project was to standardise public services and develop physical and virtual service environment according to citizens' perspective. The advantages of having such a Register is that Estonia managed to group the regulations about economic activities into one general Act. Thus all the necessary information that one needs to know about areas of activity subject to special requirements, were assembled in one place. With this Register, applications for licences, notices and information of economic activities can be affected through this channel of communication.

Pierre Schilling, showed how the MyGuichet functions in Luxembourg. Through this system, all forms can be filled and sent on line. Moreover, both the citizens and the businesses can follow-up on the procedure and state-of-play of application. Communications and notifications are done via the same system. To ease the process, documents can be uploaded on the system and the procedures can be carried out by a proxy.

Elina Koskentalo delved into the development of the XBRL system in Finland. The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) helps businesses to present the financial data in a structured and machine readable format. Moreover, the system will process the data in an automated formation and processing of reports. The benefits from such a system results from having easy accessible data, reliability of data, comparability, economical transparency and the availabilty of real-time economy data.

 Kostantinos Bovalis, gave a detailed presentation on what the European Commission is doing in this field. He mentioned that the challanges facing public administrations is that of improving the quality of their operations so as to have increased competitiveness and productivity for EU businesses. The need is there to develop synergies among institutions so as to enable effective resource utilization in piblic sector agencies.

The ISA - Interoperability Solutions for Public Administration – system that the EU had developed, has interoperability aimed at introducing an efficient eGovernment services  both at national and at EU level.  Elisabeth Kristensson explained how they have created a technical infra-structure for reporting once only obligations. She mentioned that the Swedish Government embarked on a project whereby by 2020, business community will in most cases submit information once and to one place. By doing this, the businesses will feel a positive and noticeable change in their day-to-day operations.  When this system is in place, the one million plus companies, will save a yearly 2.25 billion SEK in administrative burdens. (summary by Paul Debattista, Malta)