Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Vladimir Putin: Mr Volodin, you have been involved in the Electronic Government project. This project is aimed at eliminating red tape in the work of administrations at different levels and enabling people to communicate with the authorities and making it easier for them to resolve issues related to the processing and issuing of different documents.

The first stage of this project is implemented on the federal level and the second on the regional and local levels. The second stage is probably even more important for the public than the first. At what stage is this project today? The second stage must be completed sometime in the summer, by July 2012. How do you stand on the second stage?

Vyacheslav Volodin: Mr Putin, we have completed the first stage. We have launched interdepartmental cooperation on October 1 and 61 federal bodies are now taking part in it. We have designed 337 services and 106 electronic service systems. This allowed us to do away with 250 documents – we don’t have to ask applicants to submit them anymore. Thus, we are getting rid of red tape and demand less documents from people. All in all, 988 documents are now processed through interdepartmental cooperation. Applicants are not required to produce them.

In the past two months we have delegated almost 620,000 applications to our interdepartmental cooperation network. Before people had to address the authorities in order to obtain various government services but now this is done by a computer. Government bodies request this information from the network. This is the first federal stage. We are monitoring it and can see how the network operates.

There are some remaining issues and we are trying to resolve them. Our major headache is inaccurate information. You spoke about this when you told us to concentrate on this aspect. Now we are checking all these documents to update them. There were cases when some documents contained obsolete information.

The second stage is more difficult. At this point we must adopt interdepartmental cooperation at the regional and local levels. Moreover, as a rule, a greater number of document issuing services is performed at this level. This includes, for example, planning applications or requests for new land ownership documents.

July 1 is the deadline for completing this work. But considering it is a priority, we are planning to launch a new pilot network on a full scale by February 1 in some regions. Subsequently, we will extend Electronic Government services to more regions every month so as to cut down on red tape as much as possible. We want to improve the services to the public so that people do not have to queue. They must be able to receive promptly government services from the authorities.   

Vladimir Putin: It seems to me that the majority of people are unlikely to feel the real benefits of this system although these benefits should be tangible. Indeed, the first step has already been made and progress has been fast. Now the main goal should be to continue at the same pace.

Vyacheslav Volodin: We will try. We realise that this is a complicated project. Every region is carrying it out in a different way and some regions are lagging behind. Today there are about 10 regions that are simply trailing along at the back. We will try our best to do a good job.

Vladimir Putin: Good.