(Eagle News) — The World Bank will be supporting the Philippine government’s programs to to digitalize services and modernize the bureaucracy, according to Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno.
“I am very pleased to hear of the World Bank’s willingness to extend support for further digitalizing our revenue agencies and modernizing civil service in line with the President’s goal of rightsizing the bureaucracy,” Diokno said in a release by the Department of Finance on Thursday, August 11.
Diokno earlier tweeted about this on August 1 after his courtesy call meeting with World Bank Group Country Director Ndiame Diop.
The DOF chief said that he aimed to digitalize half of all retail payments and onboard 70 percent of the adult population to the formal financial system by 2023. This was also his goal when he was still the governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).
Diokno and Diop met to discuss further alignment and expansion of cooperation between the Philippines and the World Bank based on the Marcos administration’s socioeconomic priorities.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., said the digitalization of government services would be one of his major programs.
“The Marcos administration is implementing a comprehensive 8-point socioeconomic agenda that includes measures to optimize digitalization in improving tax administration and broadening financial inclusion,” the DOF said in a release.
–Achieving global standards through digitalization-
Currently, the World Bank is already supporting the digitalization of the Bureau of Customs (BOC) through a USD 88.28 million financing for the Philippine Customs Modernization Program.
The project focuses on transitioning from a largely manual and paper-based organization to a modernized BOC, achieving global standards and full modernization by 2024.
President Marcos said that he also planned to digitize the “voluminous records stored in the government warehouses and archives.”
“Those that are already stored in various inventories of data should be harmonized and shared across departments and agencies,” he said during his State of the Nation Address (SONA).
“Needless to say, these have to be kept in large data centers that are secure yet accessible,” he said.
As of March 2022, the World Bank is the country’s third largest Official Development Assistance (ODA) partner, with loans and grants amounting
to around USD 6.86 million or 23.38 percent of the country’s total ODA receipts.
The bank has supported 68 program and project loans of the government since 2021 or over the last three administrations amounting to a total of USD 14.9 billion, according to the DOF.
(Eagle News Service)