Thailand bags two FutureGov awards

For the last six years, the FutureGov awards have been the region’s annual celebration of public sector excellence, serving as an international benchmark for government, education and healthcare organisations in Asia Pacific.

“This year, the judges were impressed with the quality of the projects nominated by Thailand’s government,” said James Smith, chairman of the judging committee and managing director of FutureGov Magazine. “I think the winning projects reflect that Thailand’s public sector has really matured in its deployment of information technology. Both the Revenue Department and the SEC were deserving winners. I congratulate them, and hope to see more Thailand projects featured in next year’s FutureGov awards.”

Of the 522 projects submitted to compete in 23 award categories in 2012, only 100 projects were shortlisted, and the 23 winners were presented their awards last night at a ceremony held during the gala night at Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi Hotel in Chiang Mai.

The success of the Revenue Department’s Happy Tax Refund project and the Smart SEC Office were announced in front of an international audience of 160 senior government officials from Asia, Europe, United Kingdom, North America, and Africa. The awards were presented by the managing director of FutureGov Magazine, the chairman of this year’s judging committee, at the ceremony at Mandarin Oriental Dhara Dhevi Hotel in Chiang Mai.

Happy Tax Refund won the region’s best Business Process Award with its innovation and integration of IT in facilitating electronic tax refund processes and supporting the Revenue Department’s workflow.

“Optimum ICT utilisation has been one of the Revenue Department’s strategies for many years. Our e-services have been designed to serve a large number of taxpayers where they feel that they can comply with tax regulations at lower cost and shorter processing time,” said Prowmatr Huntra, principal adviser at the department.

“The FutureGov awards make the success of the individual tax-refund system even more prominent,” she added.

She said the Revenue Department’s Happy Tax Refund was designed based on a citizen-centric strategy, not only to serve taxpayers’ needs and meet with changing technology, but also to be modern and environmentally friendly.

Kumpol Sontanarat, director of ICT Department at the SEC, said that the SEC’s Smart Office aimed at “reducing burdens on operators in preparing and submitting physical documents, ensuring that the information was correct, searchable, processed and disclosed more quickly.”

The Smart SEC Office was acknowledged by the judges for the “green transformation” of its office. A paperless policy and framework were implemented along with the initiative of an online portal to submit, receive and manage electronic documents received from the SEC’s internal and external stakeholders. Smart tools were created to organise e-documents for better data archiving, searching, and optimising.