- Open administration
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The Ombudsman of Catalonia, Esther Giménez-Salinas, has presented to the President of Parliament, Joseph Rull,'Annual report of the institution corresponding to the year 2024. The report concludes that the Catalan Administration must improve in efficiency. Inefficiency generates distrust in institutions, has an impact on people's quality of life, threatens the sustainability of the welfare state, is a brake on social mobility and is an obstacle to economic development. To improve in efficiency, it is essential to resize services to adapt them to Catalonia's eight million inhabitants, as was demanded in theAnnual report 2023, but it is also necessary to simplify administrative procedures and the reaction and response time to citizens' demands.
Some of the manifestations of this inefficiency that must be urgently reversed are:
- Administration complicated and excessively bureaucratic. The bureaucratic procedures required to obtain a service are designed to have maximum control and inhibit non-compliance. This sometimes means that citizens have to submit the same documentation to different administrations because the interoperability recognized in legal regulations is not yet fully guaranteed in practice. In addition, the forms required to process certain requests are designed to facilitate the internal management of processes, but they can be a difficulty for the exercise of people's rights.
- Complex language (which is not clear or adequate enough) or not providing enough information also affects the effectiveness of a public policy. Difficulty in understanding procedures or documents translates, for example, into tax non-compliance that can result in financial penalties.
In this sense, the AOC is actively working to minimize and help reverse these and other obstacles, facilitating public administrations tools and resources to put citizens at the center of administrative processing and reduce the difficulties that citizens have in their relationship with Catalan public administrations. Thus, the AOC promotes interoperability between public administrations with services such as Via Abierta, to facilitate the telematic exchange of data and documents between administrations and public entities within the framework of an administrative procedure and with the aim of making effective the right of citizens not to provide documents that are already in the possession of Public Administrations, and an attempt is made to avoid complex language focused on administrations, with a review of the design and language of the services offered to citizens, while applying the principles of clear communication.
You can consult the most significant data from the Ombudsman's report in the infographic “Report to Parliament 2024”.