VietNamNet Bridge – Tran Anh Tuan, deputy minister of home affairs, explained to Thoi bao Kinh te Viet Nam (Viet Nam Economic Times) the results of the recent Public Administration Reform Index.

2015 is the third year the Ministry of Home Affairs released the Public Administration Reform Index (PARI) of all ministries, cities and provinces nation wide. Are there any differences in the result this year compared with the previous two years?

A key objective of having the PARI is to improve the quality of service of civil servants and public employees in implementing the government's one door policy to better serve the people.

The 2014 PARI has reflected efforts made by all ministries, sectors and locality during the year.

The 2014 PARI covers several activities relating to our current reform programme on civil servants and public employees, including job description, position criteria, working discipline, IT application and others.

In addition, in 2014 we also conducted a sociological survey to make the PARI more objective, precise and better quality.

Will you please explain why the median score of the 2014 PARI was lower than that of 2013?

There are several reasons leading to such a result. But I should say the median score of 2014 is higher than that of 2012, but a bit lower than that of 2013. A key factor causing this may be due to the first time introduction of job description and position criteria for civil servants and public employees. Or maybe the level of satisfaction of the interviewees involved in the sociological survey was low. For example, the result of a survey conducted in ministries and sectors accounted for just 40 out of 100 points while that in the locality it was 38 out of 100.

In addition, the 2014 PARI set higher requirement standards for ministries and sectors in their performance assigned by the Party and Government. That's why their PARI for 2014 is lower than that of last year.

So in your opinion, what areas should the ministries, sectors and localities improve in the future?

In my opinion, we should develop specific requirements and institutions for each area in a ministry or sector. It is also imperative to apply IT in all administrative systems while improving the professional quality of our civil servants and employees.

Ministries, sectors or provinces which stood at the bottom of the PARI rankings were not happy with such a rating. How do you respond to their grievances?

The first thing I should say is that the PARI is based on the contents of the on-going administrative reforms in our country. During the implementation of the administration reforms, in all 63 cities and provinces, plus 19 ministries and ministerial level agencies nation wide, we asked the same questions. It was impossible for us to have different sets of questions for certain groups of ministries or localities.

I'm confident, by learning while doing, next year PARI will produce better results than this year.

If we compare results of the recent Public Administrative Performance Index (PAPI) and the Provincial Comparative Index (PCI) with the PARI in one province regarding the Public Administration Reform, the indexes are quite different. How do you respond to that?

The first thing I should say is that each locality cannot do all the rating by themselves. In the rating scale, 60 per cent is rated by the office staff themselves while the other 40 per cent is rated in participants in a sociological survey, including ordinary people, enterprises or offices located in the locality.

At present, the Ministry of Home Affairs is jointly conducted a survey on the people's satisfaction with services offered by public administration offices with the Viet Nam Fatherland Front and the Viet Nam War Veterans.

We hope results of that survey will further help us understand about the performance of our administrative system.

Source: VNS