Law

Lesson 4: Opportunities and challenges

Law Reporter Group • April 15, 2025 09:13

Digital transformation is the key to opening up great opportunities for the Judiciary, helping to reform processes, improve management efficiency and serve the people better. However, this process also faces difficulties and challenges in infrastructure, human resources and legal framework. To create a breakthrough, synchronous and comprehensive solutions and close cooperation between functional agencies are needed.

15/04/2025

Although very positive results have been achieved, the implementation of Project 06 in the judicial sector still faces many difficulties and shortcomings: Technical infrastructure does not meet requirements (software often fails; connection and data sharing are sometimes slow in some places...).

There is still a situation at the commune level where there is no separate equipment for registration and household management, and printers and scanners must be shared with other departments.

Some localities use computers that are too old, have low configuration, slow and unstable internet connection, so the operation is malfunctioning; population data is not synchronized with specialized data, and information on changes in citizens' civil status is not updated in a timely manner; digitized civil status data still has errors and lacks information. Most localities have not yet allocated funds for the implementation of Project 06...

Mr. Lau Ba Cho - Head of the Justice Department of Ky Son district said: The connection and sharing of data between the National Population Database and the Databases of the Justice sector (such as the Civil Status Database, the Nationality Database, the Judicial Records Database, the Legal Aid Database, the Civil Judgment Enforcement Database...) have not been well exploited, including some software that is in the process of upgrading, so the connection and sharing are not timely.

Especially for mountainous districts like Ky Son, currently the majority of people in the area do not have VNeID accounts to carry out administrative procedures through online public services (no owner SIM, people mainly use network SIM for communication...). Therefore, when coming to do transactions, in many cases, they have to ask officials to do it for them.

Mr. Lo Van Tuyen - a civil servant of justice and civil status in Ngoc Lam commune (Thanh Chuong) expressed: The biggest difficulty now is that the connection equipment to carry out electronic transactions is still limited, the transmission line is not strong enough when carrying out many transactions, leading to slow processing of documents. Young people can access electronic transactions quickly, but the elderly, especially ethnic minorities, find it very difficult. So it is inevitable that officials have to do it for them. Not to mention, many data are missing and inconsistent, making it difficult to carry out transactions.

For example, Mr. Luong Van Nhat (born in 1988), residing in Tan Hop village, whom the reporter met at the one-stop shop of Ngoc Lam Commune, came to complete the death certificate procedure for his brother Luong Van Thin (born in 1976) who passed away in 2011, in order to carry out the procedure of dividing the inheritance of land.

However, Mr. Nhat said that because Mr. Thin died in 2011 without making a citizen identification card, it was difficult to look up information and records, so the transaction could not be carried out.

According to Mr. Vi Hoang Ha - Head of the Justice Department of Quy Hop district: To carry out transactions in the electronic environment, the most important thing is that infrastructure and equipment must be guaranteed.

However, Quy Hop is a mountainous district, with 14/21 communes facing special difficulties. In reality, the current processing speed of the transmission line is sometimes slow, the network is often interrupted, and the time to receive documents is long, greatly affecting the procedure settlement for citizens.

Some localities also pointed out the reality: The level of information technology and technology application skills of some officials, civil servants and people are still limited, so in the implementation process, they encounter many difficulties in receiving and handling administrative procedures in the electronic environment.

The issuance of personal identification numbers is sometimes slow, and the cancellation/deletion of identification numbers on the electronic registration and management software used by the Ministry of Justice is slow, significantly affecting the time to carry out birth registration procedures and people's rights.

The number of administrative procedures in the field of certification received in the electronic environment at some units is still limited and the rate is low, such as: Que Phong district received 189/31,645 records, reaching only 0.59%; Do Luong district received 635/11,231 records, reaching 5.6%; Thai Hoa town received 1159/8040 records, reaching 14.41%...

According to the Department of Justice's assessment, the process of electronically connecting two groups of administrative procedures (birth registration, permanent residence registration, health insurance card issuance for children under 6 years old and death registration, permanent residence cancellation, funeral allowance, funeral cost support) still has some shortcomings such as: Electronic signing of birth certificates and death certificates is still confusing; Transferring files and synchronizing status between specialized software and public service software is still slow; Public service software often encounters errors (unable to access the information portal, authentication errors from the national public service page, etc.).

In addition, the electronic registration and management software is sometimes not timely; there is still a delay in returning identification codes when performing birth registration...

According to Ms. Hoang Thi Nga - Head of the Justice Department of Thanh Chuong District: The key tasks in the judicial field regarding digital transformation are electronic authentication and civil status work. To perform these two tasks well, the Justice sector has coordinated with the Public Security and Social Insurance sectors to effectively implement interconnected administrative procedures on the national public service portal: Birth registration, permanent residence registration, and issuance of health insurance cards for children under 6 years old.

This content has been deployed since May 2020 up to now in Thanh Chuong district, basically there has been close coordination between the Justice, Police and Social Insurance to ensure the registration of birth, permanent residence and issuance of insurance cards for children under 6 years old quickly and promptly.

However, the implementation process in Thanh Chuong district also encountered certain difficulties because when implementing the interconnection, administrative procedures that were originally received and resolved by 3 different departments were now all received and processed by judicial officials, while the number of tasks of the commune judicial officials was large and the number of people was limited (some communes only had 1 judicial officer - civil status officer).

Besides, the actual connection on the software is only between the birth registration software and the insurance card issuance software; it is not yet connected on the permanent residence registration procedure software.

The process of returning results is also facing certain difficulties (for example, citizens want to have their cards returned at home, but currently the card return is still being carried out through judicial officials, especially in remote areas). The time limit for returning results of procedures, especially the issuance of health insurance cards, is still slow and not guaranteed according to regulations.

In the context of an economy undergoing increasingly strong digital transformation, the application of information technology in all areas of social life has become an inevitable trend, including notarization in general and electronic notarization in particular.

However, according to Mr. Nguyen Canh Toan - Head of Notary Office No. 1 - Department of Justice: Currently, there is no specific guidance from the Ministry of Justice on the reconciliation and cleaning between the criminal record database and the national population database.

Therefore, the implementation of Model 8 on the use of authentication devices in notary activities faces many limitations. In particular, the information field exploited from authentication devices is very small (ID cards only have information on full name, date of birth and place of residence), there is no personal relationship information, causing difficulties for notary organizations.

Along with that, the QR code reader and chip reader on the citizen ID card of current providers can only read some basic information fields such as: Comparing photos and citizen ID photos (verifying whether they are valid or invalid); Card information such as citizen ID number, effective date, old ID number and expiration date; Personal information: Full name, date of birth, gender, nationality, hometown, permanent residence, religion, ethnicity, characteristics; Information of relatives, father's name, mother's name, wife/husband's name.

As for the new type of ID card, there are fewer information fields and no fingerprint recognition…

Mr. Nguyen Canh Toan also said that Resolution 172/NQ-CP of the Government dated November 19, 2020 on the policy of developing the notary profession has identified the task of promoting the application of IT in notary activities, meeting the requirements of building e-Government and the 4th Industrial Revolution.

In particular, completing the construction of a notary database according to regulations; developing an implementation plan, guiding the connection and sharing of data on land, housing, businesses, and residents with the notary database to ensure interconnection between relevant departments and branches with notary practice organizations...

However, up to now, the relationship between the notary office, the tax office, and the land use rights certificate issuing agency has not been connected. Therefore, after notarizing the land transaction contract at the notary office, people still have to bring the documents to the land use rights certificate issuing agency to wait for the procedure, which is very time-consuming and often causes congestion.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Uyen - Head of Notary Office No. 2 (located in Dien Chau district) pointed out another important issue related to the accuracy of facial recognition technology. The software sometimes still successfully authenticates people with similar faces, which poses a risk of misidentifying people.

There are cases where the right person requested the notarization but the facial authentication results in invalid results if there is a change in hairstyle. In addition, the information on the current citizen identification card is still limited, only full name, date of birth and place of residence, without fingerprints or information related to personal relationships. This makes it more difficult to accurately identify the subject in notarization transactions.

Ms. Nguyen Thi Uyen suggested that in order to use citizen identification card readers in notarization work more effectively, there should be support from the Ministry of Public Security in sharing fingerprints and adding information about personal relationships on citizen identification cards and identification cards.

The Ministry of Justice needs to closely coordinate with the Ministry of Public Security to connect and share data between the national population database and the databases of the justice sector, such as the electronic civil status database and the nationality database. This will facilitate notary organizations to access data directly from the national databases, thereby improving the quality and efficiency of work and ensuring the accuracy of notary transactions.

Besides, according to many notaries, one of the big problems is that the cost of ID card readers is quite high, because the purchase of applications is often in packages with a limited number of accesses.

However, the number of notarized transactions is very large, a notarized document set can involve from 1 to more than 10 people, and each person needs to access the software at least twice: Once to authenticate the citizen ID and once to authenticate the face. This leads to a situation where the number of accesses is quickly exhausted, causing interruptions in work.

These are the difficulties and shortcomings in the digitalization journey, requiring synchronous solutions to overcome them...