Eight out of ten Romanians went to the counter of a public institution and only a fifth opted for electronic payment of taxes during the pandemic, according to a UiPath survey obtained exclusively by Economedia. However, the survey shows an extraordinary openness of citizens for automation, 90% of those surveyed believe that automation will improve the quality of public services and the citizen’s experience in interacting with the public administration. In a discussion with Economedia, UiPath representatives claim that there is an appetite of citizens for automation, but there is also an interest from the state, with which the company is already carrying out a series of projects.
Despite the fact that last year marked the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, most Romanians interacted with public administration institutions physically, at the counter, according to the UiPath survey. In 2020, 8 out of 10 Romanians went to the headquarters of public authorities for various purposes. The payment of taxes, fees, and tariffs of any kind is the main reason citizens interacted with the central or local public administration. More specifically, almost a fifth of Romanians made at least 7 trips to the counters of various central or local public authorities, to solve personal problems or work interests. On average, a citizen who wanted to submit documents, to obtain approval of applications, or to pay taxes and fees, made 3 to 4 trips a year to the counters of various institutions.
Only about a fifth of Romanians opted in 2020 for the electronic payment of taxes, fees, or other tariffs. More than half of Romanians went to the counter, and less than a tenth used both the internet and the counter.
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Those who submitted applications and documents online had a significantly better experience than those who went to the counter. More precisely, almost half of Romanians (48%) said that after submitting applications and documents at the counter they were quite dissatisfied with the experience, with 33% dissatisfied and 15% very dissatisfied. Regarding the experience of submitting applications and documents via the Internet, more than 6 out of 10 Romanians (62%) consider the interaction to be satisfactory (with 47% quite satisfied, and 15% very satisfied), slightly more than one in ten (12%) considered the experience unsatisfactory, and about a fifth said they do not know or cannot appreciate.
In the future, almost two-thirds of Romanians would like the option to submit online applications and documents for obtaining various social benefits. These include unemployment benefits (65%), state child allowance, childcare allowance or social assistance (64%), subsidy for heat, electricity or gas (64%), criminal records (63%), or registration and deregistration of cars (63%).
Almost a quarter of Romanians have received a public service with delays, or have not received it at all in the last two years. Specifically, 26% of respondents stated that, regardless of the way they interact with the public authorities, in the last two years they did not receive a public service or receive it late, due to errors.
For over 90% of the participants in the survey, automation could be a solution to improve public administration services by: reducing operating costs (75%), allocating more time to citizens (68%), avoiding human error in processing requests (58%) and resolving a large number of requests in a shorter time (55%).
A clear majority of the population knows that the following operations can be performed by automation: Opening e-mails and attachments (71%), reading and completing databases (68%), extracting data from documents, e-mails, and forms (67%), performing calculation operations (63%). Therefore, the way people think about the effects of process automation and the use of software robots on the quality of public services motivates them to support the digitalization of public administration.
Răzvan Atim, General Manager for Eastern Europe at UiPath, said the following: “The digitalization and automation of public services brings benefits to both citizens and public officials by facilitating and improving interaction with the public administration. This is true both in situations where citizens access digital services and when they prefer to go to the counter. With the help of technology, a chatbot can sort citizens’ requests, and while the official talks to the citizen, a robot can run on his computer, processing information and checking databases, which can considerably shorten waiting times. We are glad that most Romanians support the digitalization of services in the public sector and also that a large part of them are aware of the advantages of automation and are optimistic about the concrete benefits that this technology can bring to citizens.”
The survey on the digitalization of public administration and the attitude of citizens towards the use of software robots in the public sector in Romania was conducted by Socius – Center for Applied Social Research at the request of UiPath on February 4-18, 2021. 900 adults aged 18 and over were interviewed. The sample is representative of the resident, noninstitutionalized adult population of Romania. With a 95% confidence rate, the maximum allowable margin of error is plus or minus 3.3%. The data collection was performed by the CATI method (computer-assisted telephone interviews) by Elicom.
“There is a public appetite for automation”
UiPath representatives discussed with Economedia the results of this survey and claimed that, although Romania is at the bottom of the digital rankings, some progress is visible, the potential is there, and we have the appetite as citizens for automation, and now there is openness from the authorities as they began to implement a series of solutions.
According to the survey, a small percentage of people use the existing digital solutions offered by the authorities and some people still choose to go to the counter, although they can avoid this. UiPath representatives explain this phenomenon by a “mixture of lack of infrastructure combined with the fact that major changes need time to take place. But it is gratifying that there is also an appetite and interest for people to use public services more and more in a digital form ”.
“Automation eliminates those mechanical work processes, such as copy-paste, in which people waste time with paperwork and a lot of data, slowing down the processes, amounting to a lot of bureaucracy. When you want to have a decent interaction with a public authority, you end up waiting a long time for a simple request: allowances, information on parking space registrations. There are situations in which, if you have a request from the financial authority, you have to go to the counter all the time. Compared to other countries – although Romania is not the only case – the adoption of automation is very difficult in the state apparatus. I put it on a topic of slowness in educating the authorities and the public sector in general about what technology means and the benefits it brings “, says Răzvan Atim, General Manager for Eastern Europe at UiPath.
According to him, we already use a lot of technology, but that probably why we are not aware of it. However, we just need to be more open and aware of where technology is taking us. More precisely, towards “a better, more productive future, as it helps us to be more attractive as a country, …it would be of help to us and investors would look with more interest if they knew that things would go much easier and faster “, says Atim.
UiPath has automated the granting of unemployment benefits and the contracting of Hidroelectrica customers
For example, UiPath has already successfully implemented a process to automate the processing of unemployment assistance within the National Agency for Payments and Social Inspection (ANPIS).
“At the beginning of the pandemic, people were expecting unemployment benefits from ANPIS, which they probably wouldn’t have received during 2020 if they hadn’t automated that process. There were 110,000 applications. The implementation on our part lasted two weeks and it was done at the national level, in 38 counties. They used humans without ever having the problem of robots taking their jobs. The implementation speed is very high and you do not have long-term costs “, says Răzvan Atim.
UiPath has also implemented an automation process for the state-owned company Hidroelectrica, which was overwhelmed earlier this year by a wave of domestic customers who wanted to change their electricity supplier.
“Hidroelectrica has started to innovate and adopt automation solutions on long, manual processes, which also involve a large number of customers, with 15,000 household customers. The robots extract the data from the emails, look for keywords in the subject, check if there is an attachment, download that document, extract the data from the document, and process it in the internal system of Hidroelectrica. Having a large number of customers, there is a lot of data to process. From the point of view of the company’s costs and productivity, it is a great benefit “, explains Răzvan Atim. According to him, Hidroelectrica has a desire to go further and to automate or identify automation opportunities in all the business lines of the company.
What we need to do to accelerate the digitalization
Digitalization must be centralized from the point of view of Răzvan Atim. “It is very important to have a centralized database, in which practically the whole country is covered and you have access to any data you want, from any ministry. And you can do a lot of things with that data, from a technology standpoint. You can have an application, a CRM (customer relationship management system, no.), where you manage the data in the territory for all the working points, you can make statistics, you can make reconciliations, you can track workflows, you can automate procedures. Then things would be on a very coherent and open flow, transparent and would offer a different perspective in terms of country and institutional productivity “, says Atim.
Margareta Chesaru, Public Affairs Manager la UiPath, also believes that a series of legislative reforms and concrete investments are needed to encourage a digital transformation. “Legislation on the one hand can encourage digital transformation, on the other hand, it can block it. The digital transformation part must have several components. One is to look at the legislative reforms that need to be made. Let’s see how we can stimulate the adoption of technology and innovation, updating laws that are outdated, that were adopted in a different time context from the current reality, and that now need to rethink in terms of the use of technology. Secondly, you need to actually encourage digital transformation projects. We are not only talking about reforms, but we are also talking about concrete investments, where it would be good to start with a vision so that we do not end up creating islands, or a lack of uniformity “, says Chesaru.
Another component that must exist is that of “awareness”, which must also be translated into education. “You will be able to use technology as a civil servant much easier when you understand it, and you can come up with ideas, you can create certain new processes, you can come up with an innovation when you know the potential of technology and its limits”, according to Margareta Chesaru.
How do we use EU money for digitalization?
Romania will receive substantial amounts for digitalization through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). What would be the first things that should be done with this money, from the perspective of UiPath?
“The first thing: a major investment in infrastructure should be made, in new operating systems, new computers, and cloud should be bought.
After that, I would take care of the people who work on those programs in the state apparatus; these people need to be qualified. In order to become attractive to the private sector, you need to encourage these people to come to the public sector, to provide them with the necessary working conditions in the public sector on large initiatives. This means that you have to give them some salaries competitive with the private sector, to make sure that they are specialists and they know what they need to execute there.
On point three, we need to change legislation that is no longer relevant and evaluate the work processes in each institution to see where bottlenecks form, and to improve them.
We need to go through these steps in order to benefit fully from automation, and in general, from technology at full capacity. Only then on the 4-5th places will come the automation and the adoption of technology, because then you have something to work with and with whom to work, to successfully implement these actions in the long term at a high-quality level.
The more we invest in the quality of these points, the faster and more remarkable will be the change of this country “, Răzvan Atim concludes.
Translated from Romanian by Service For Life S.R.L.