On April 28, 2003 at 11h 8m and 23s, Mr. Santiago Camps and Pinyol, secretary of the Regional Council of the Ribera d'Ebre, sent a communication to the Official Gazette of the Generalitat de Catalunya. This marked the launch of a tool, promoted by the Department of Governance and Institutional Relations of the Generalitat of Catalonia, aimed at reducing postal correspondence and paper support in relations between city councils and the Generalitat. At that time, the opening ofEACAT It allowed the use of three services: the aforementioned publication in the DOGC, the application for a subsidy program aimed at county councils called Xarxa 41 and the subsidies from the PUOSC.
Today, the entire Catalan public sector uses it for its communications and receives it reciprocally: town councils, county councils, provincial councils, the Generalitat, the public business sector, universities, chambers of commerce and various parliamentary bodies, such as the Parliament of Catalonia itself, the Auditors' Offices and the Ombudsman's Office, the CAC, etc. By putting data into it, this representa that Over 23.000 public workers from about 2.000 interact with us.
The inter-administrative processing services make it possible to replace paper document submissions with those corresponding in electronic form, maintaining legal validity with the incorporation of the recognized electronic signature, as well as with the management of electronic entries in the registers, both those of output of the sending organism as those of entry of the receiving organism.
Currently, EACAT has been consolidated as a tool that has allowed all Catalan administrations to advance in the field of electronic administration. Managed by the AOC Consortium since 2004 (result of the management assignment of the Department of Governance and Institutional Relations) over these first 10 years of history it has developed more than 300 administrative procedures and the administrations have exchanged more than 730.000 shipments.
If we calculate the savings during these 10 years of all the Catalan administrations, following the parameters described in the “Local administrative burden reduction manual”Prepared by the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Public Administration, together with the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, which define a difference of 75 ′ between the submission of an application in person or online, we could say that this saving has exceeded 54 million euros.
Services and access requirementsIts services include for its mass use the sending of publication to the DOGC, the sending of acts and agreements to the General Directorate of Local Administration of the Department of Governance and Institutional Relations, the procedures of the General Directorate for Immigration. and grants from the Department of Social Welfare and Family, applications for collective burns and fire permits from the Corps of Rural Agents of the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, Food and Rural Affairs, as well as grants of the PUOSC.
The access requirements to EACAT are basic: all you need is a computer connected to the Internet and that the user making the transmission has an electronic certificate. In addition, EACAT has provided some collateral benefits such as the fact that its implementation throughout the Catalan public sector has provided at least every mayor and municipal secretary and many senior officials and technical staff of the Generalitat with the corresponding T-CAT, the card addressed to staff of the Catalan public administrations that contains digital certificates from CATCert. This fact has helped to promote other electronic administration projects.
The consolidation ofEACAT This is because its benefits are clear: savings in travel and postal mail; reduction in time, given that the registration is immediate; the guarantee of legal certainty when processing; without forgetting a significant reduction in the ecological cost of processing by replacing the paper format with electronic.
EACAT is an example of collaboration between administrations and we consider that the goals established in 2003 have been achieved. In the first year of activity, 168 submissions were made. During the first three months of 2013, more than 71.000 have already been processed, consolidating a continuous exponential increase, year after year.
