The Minister of State Reform, Gonçalo Matias, announced on Wednesday that the Government will establish the position of Director of Information Systems and Technologies for Public Administration to ensure “that all public administration computer systems communicate with each other.”
The plan, according to the minister’s revelation on the podcast ‘Política com Assinatura’, Antena 1, is “set to be implemented and underway by the end of the year.”
“Why do we go to an office and get asked for documents? It’s not due to the ill will of the employee sitting there. It’s because that person does not have access to the information and documents needed to make decisions, which is why they ask for them. However, the State has the legal obligation, it’s in the law, it was a PSD Government that put it into law, to not request documents that the State already has,” he explained.
Gonçalo Martins believes state reform should primarily focus on simplification.
“Bureaucracy creates the environment necessary for corruption, and corruption feeds on bureaucracy,” he claimed, estimating that bureaucracies cost Portugal “10 billion euros.”
“No objective of dismissal”
During the same interview, the minister promised that state reform would not involve laying off civil servants. “There is no program or objective of dismissing civil servants,” he assured, adding that if a service has too many workers, “what can be done is a revaluation of these people and a reallocation of them.”
According to Gonçalo Matias, the Government’s proposal “is not to implode the State, to start from scratch, nor to implement superficial changes.”
The idea, he explained, is to assess the State, identify which entities should be dissolved, and which should be merged.
“We do not intend to destroy the State; what cannot happen is for the State to drown people and companies in bureaucracy, nor to entangle itself,” he concluded.
