Digitization, Electronization of the State Treasury - Optimal Choice in the Technology Age 4.0

Operating at the Treasury Department of Government. Picture: ST.

Electronization, digitization - immense thought but starting from a small one

Talking about digitalization and the State Treasury electronic system, Vice Minister of Finance, Tran Xuan Ha said: "This is the optimal choice in the context of technology development 4.0. Modernization and digitization that will help the State Treasury to carry out cost accounting, accounting, statistics, reporting and information on public debt management and public asset management.

Although the state treasury system has made great efforts in applying information technology for treasury operations in recent years, such as building the management system of state budget revenue, state budget management system, the Payment system between the Treasury and the bank; Online public service ..., but the implementation of electronic and digital system of the Treasury still encounters many inadequacies. It is not synchronously deployed in all the treasury operations, mainly the revenue-expenditure and payment operations. Efficiency is not really high because the management of treasury is not really complete ...

At the international symposium of the Association of the International Monetary Fund (AIST), entitled "Modernizing Treasury through Electronization, Digitalization", held in Hanoi at the end of March, on this issue, Mr. Didier Cornillet, Secretary General of AIST, said that digitalization affects almost every field of operation, and this is a big challenge for the administrative bodies of countries in general and in Vietnam in particular, in terms of ensuring the effectiveness of public affairs.

According to Mr. Didier, the shift from paper vouchers to digitization, electronics will face many difficulties and challenges. It is difficult to digitize at the same time. Therefore, it is necessary to have a suitable and flexible route in the deployment so that the digitization process can be easily received by the concerned parties. "We have to think immensely but start from small things. There should be a serious study of the consequences of the process, the aspects of regulations and organization in terms of human resources, accounting ... "- said Didier.

Further analysis of the need to digitize the Treasury system in the digital age, said Seghrouchni Mohamed El Amine, the head of the IT development office in Morocco, digitalization will help us to spend reasonably and effectively, helping to improve the business environment. For several years the world has raised the issue of environmental degradation, because of the fact that we use too much paper during work (each year we use about 400 tons of paper vouchers, equivalent to about $ 40 million), which must exploit a huge amount of forest trees and negatively influences the environment. Digitization will help us improve our environmental resources ... "- said Seghrouchni.

Sharing about the digitization and electronicization route of the Moroccan Treasury system, Seghrouchn said that the country has taken very specific steps to completely eliminate the paperwork. "In 2018, we strengthened the legal basis for digitization. The year of 2019 will be the launch of technical bidding. By 2020, all bidding units will be electronically submitted and in 2021, all paper files will be completely abandoned, "Seghrouchni said.

Roadmap towards electronic treasuries

According to Deputy Minister Tran Xuan Ha, although the model of treasury management in Vietnam is different from other countries in the region and in the world, the treasuries have the common functions and tasks as well as similarity, such as revenue concentration, budget management, cash flow management, as well as accounting, debt accounting and public assets. Accordingly, in order to reach the e-treasury model, the State Treasury system will continue to perfect the mechanism and policies on state budget revenues and expenditures, public finance management and public asset management. On that basis, standardizing the operations of the Treasury. At the same time, there should be solutions for the development of electronic and digitized information technology systems in line with the mechanism of decentralization of budgetary management between the central and local levels.

From the reality of operation of treasury systems in the world, delegates participating in the conference, "Modernizing the Treasury through electronic and digitalization", agreed that to turn to e-treasuries to completely dismiss the paper voucher system requires 10 steps for completion. In particular: payment by bank transfer to suppliers and payments for personal payments (salary and benefits), digitizing the public accounting system, authorizing expenditures, implementing taxes and paying online to increase tax revenues, integrating local accounting systems with the central accounting system, the voucher with or without electronic signature to use digital signature for management report, digitize status balance, goods from the source (primary) vouchers, and the final step is to digitize electronic signatures ...

Emphasizing the importance of digitalization in the Treasury system, Mr. Ta Anh Tuan, Acting General Director of the State Treasury, said that the state treasury system is implementing a modernization process aimed at building an Electronic treasury - a very important step in the roadmap implementation of the Development Strategy to 2020.

To be certain with the detailed roadmap, thorough preparation by the Treasury in general and the State Bank of Vietnam in particular, is required for the model of electronic treasury with the conversion from paper to digitized. Electronization is not far off, and certainly this is also a trend in the current technology 4.0 era ...