[size=55:22w13pf8]novinite 11 October 2010



1st Bulgarian Municipality Switches to e-Government

The small town of Ihtiman has become the first municipality in Bulgaria to work with an electronic archive for fast and convenient administrative services.

The electronic archive was implement through an EU-funded project for "
Improvement of Administrative Services through Development of e-Government."


The total funding of BGN 395 000 was provided by Operational Program Administrative Capacity, and was co-funded through the European Social Fund.

"
I think that the citizens and the business sector will have much greater trust in the Ihtiman Municipality now that we have e-government in place,"
said Margarita Petkova, Mayor of Ihtiman, who was in charge of implementing the project.

The new electronic system will allow the residents of the municipality to follow the work of the local government from home or from their offices. They can check the status of the documents that they have requested, and the name of the civil servant working on their request.

"
We can literally see the results of our work improving, and people's trust in our services has grown,"
said representatives of the local administration.

Ihtiman has a population of 14 000, the Ihtiman Municipality includes 19 000 people. It is located 48 km south-east of Sofia and 95 km west of Plovdiv.

This all sound very good but lets not forget that a system such as this is only as good as the information that's put in so once all the people who run this system have had full training then it could work as it does all round the world but Bulgaria always want to cut corners and thats where they always fall down