Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

category is called “Cerca de Usted,” which offers
personalized information about services offered in
nearby government office locations. The latest (second)
iteration of the portal was launched in April
2003. In addition to the externally obvious upgrades,
the new version incorporates XML. It has a new
text-only version that is more accessible for people
with disabilities and offers content in all of Spain’s
official languages: Spanish, Basque, Catalonian,
Galician and Valencian. The site also now contains
an International Portal in Spanish, French and
English, specifically for foreign users.
Individual agencies have introduced new customerfriendly
electronic services over the past year as
well. For example, the Tax Agency (www.aeat.es) has
added to its electronic services a seized property
auctions service. Under this system, anyone who
wishes to participate in an online auction may do
so without having to be physically present at the
location where the auction is taking place.
Another new service is telematics billing, which
allows companies to present bills below €3,000
automatically in electronic format to the Tax Agency.
Companies are obliged to present copies of their
bills at the end of the fiscal year for their VAT returns
and to save copies of their bills during a specific
period of time to facilitate audits. Now companies
may save these bills in digital/scanned format.
The Social Security Agency now allows companies to
pay their workers’ social security fees using private
banking services, such as ATMs, phone banking and
Internet banking. Until last March the service was
only offered in person at bank branches.
In August 2003, the Ministry of Economy became
the first organization of the Spanish central
administration to have fully incorporated digital
identification in its internal processes. All 2,860
Ministry employees now have fully functional digital
identities in the form of smart cards. The department’s
2,200 personal computers have been equipped with
cryptographic card readers, enabling employees to
access, fill and sign 40 electronic forms corresponding
to internal administrative procedures, for greatly
improved operational efficiency.
To fight fraud, the National Institute of Employment
Service (www.inem.es) of the Social Security Agency
now allows employees to consult the “Labour Life
Registry” from their computers to check if benefitseekers
are really unemployed. Additionally, the
service developed Contrat@, a Web application that
allows employers to submit employee contracts
for new hires electronically and information about
transitions from temporary to permanent status,
contact extensions, and so on, as obliged by law.
The system was released in April 2003 and reached
20 percent participation by September 2003.
A number of advances related to electronic voting
have recently appeared. One is www.elecciones.mir.es,
which allowed citizens to follow the results during
the elections night. The website also offers practical
information about election legislation, political parties
registered in the Ministry of the Interior and a
database with all the results of the elections that
have been held in Spain since 1977.
Another eDemocracy innovation was
Candidato2004.net, www.candidato2004.net. Its
objective was to become an open forum for debate
between candidates and citizens for the duration of
the official campaign, which officially kicked off in
February 2004. The website contents included the
election platform of each party and details about
candidates for each province. Once registered on the
site, any citizen could post questions to any of the
more than 2,000 candidates. The candidates received
these questions in private and either posted a public
answer on the website or rejected the queries. In
such cases, the citizen received an e-mail with the
reason for the rejection and an invitation to reformulate
the query. Candidates from all major Spanish
parties made a commitment to answer these citizens’
queries in the shortest possible time.
eGovernment improvements such as these point to
the potential for real innovation within Spain’s public
administration. The country may have faltered
during the past year because of its focus on developing
a new strategy and plan of action. Review of
the plans shows an interest in customer-focused
services and in building collaboration among different
public authorities. The latter objective will be
critical to accomplishing the former. Many public
services are provided at the regional level. Now, the
government has the considerable challenge of building
the collaboration and interoperability needed to
merge these separate efforts for a truly cohesive
experience for the citizens.
99