“Our activities aimed at introducing order and uniformity in the conduct of local administrations in order to reduce bureaucracy and respond effectively to parties’ requests in the past period also involved making an inventory of proceedings conducted by local self-government units at the request of citizens and the economy and we found a total of 188” State Secretary, Zoran Kasalovic said at “Regulatory Reform – Standardization of the Conduct of Towns and Municipalities in Serbia”.
He said that the goal is to standardize and harmonize the conduct of local self-governments, improve the application of legislation, save time and reduce costs for citizens and the economy …
Parallel to the standardization process in Serbia, the implementation of the new Act on General Administrative Proceedings has begun, said Kasalovic and emphasized that it is an important novelty that this law governs the liability to exchange data from public records ex officio.
“We have put the citizens and businessmen in the center and they are no longer liable to walk from one counter to another and collect documents and data already held by the public administration,” he said.
This exercise was additionally facilitated by the information system of the e-APA (Act on Administrative Proceeding) established by the Serbian government in June this year, said Kasalovic, adding that this system is a way for even faster data exchange between the authorities, by electronic means.
“Currently, this system contains data from registries, on domicile, citizenship, as well as the data from the National Employment Service, the Tax Administration, the Central Registry of Compulsory Social Insurance and the Pension and Disability Insurance Fund,” he said.
He added that it was planned to include centers for social work as soon as possible, as well as educational institutions at all levels of education (primary, secondary, high).
So far, 55 municipalities and towns were granted permanent access to this database, and seven of them joined the database, Kasalovic said and praised the local self-governments that were among the first to join – Loznica and Vrnjacka Banja.
Secretary General of the Standing Conference of Towns and Municipalities, Djordje Stanicic, said that the goal is for the conduct of administrative proceedings to be fully harmonized throughout Serbia.
He added that out of 188 procedures, the vast majority referred to the economy and businessmen.
The conference “Regulatory Reform – Standardization of Conduct of Towns and Municipalities in Serbia” was organized within the program “Support to Local Governments in Serbia in the EU Integration Process – Second Phase”, funded by the Government of Sweden.
The Conference was organized by the Standing Conference of Towns and Municipalities in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government.