In the digital age, with three areas of digital government, digital economy and digital society, citizens must have a "digital signature - CA" to electronically authenticate digital transactions.
Free level
In the process of comprehensive national digital transformation, Vietnam has also determined that each adult citizen, in addition to a personal identification number, also has a personal digital certificate (CA).
This is a personal CA, different from the CA of organizations, with the same value as a personal handwritten signature. CA is used to authenticate personal identity through the following cases: signing documents or electronic documents such as contracts, invoices... as well as using in online transactions such as declaring personal transactions, transactions via electronic banking - mobile banking or securities transactions, electronic social insurance declaration...
Vietnam's national strategy for developing the digital economy and digital society aims for 50% of the adult population to own a CA by 2025. In recent times, the National Electronic Authentication Center (NEAC), the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC), has coordinated with the Vietnam CA and E-Transaction Club (VCDC), and public CA service providers to deploy many solutions for people to own and use CA. Notably, campaigns to promote and provide free personal CAs to people have been implemented. Accordingly, public CA services have had many policies to exempt and reduce service prices, such as free remote CA use for people when performing online public services; there is a discount policy for doctors and teachers with a price of about 50,000 VND/year of use. CA services also flexibly design many payment methods for remote CA such as prepaid packages, signing by turns, short-term packages with prices starting from only 300 VND/signing when making other online transactions. In Hanoi, a booth providing free CA for citizens will open from mid-April 2023 in the Hoan Kiem Lake Walking Street area until the end of 2023. Ms. To Thi Thu Huong, Director of NEAC, said: "The widespread application of CA will increase the trust of people, businesses and organizations when conducting transactions in the electronic environment, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public services provided by the Government to people and businesses".
VNPT Group commits to providing all CAs free of charge to citizens when performing digital signature transactions with administrative procedures on all national/ministry, sector/province and city public service portals.
VNPT SmartCA helps users sign digitally on personal mobile devices safely, conveniently and legally recognized. Photo: VNPT
Create a legal corridor for replication
However, the biggest barrier for people is the cost of personal CA, although it is initially issued for free and even used for free for a period of time. After that, people still have to renew the CA at a not small cost.
The reference price for the low-cost type is the VNPT-CA personal package, the lowest is 715,000 VND/year and 550,000 VND when renewing. There are other services that charge up to more than 1 million VND for a year of using a personal CA. The second limitation is that up to now, the number of services to use CA is still too small. According to NEAC, there are a number of main reasons leading to the low number of personal CA users such as people and businesses do not clearly understand the benefits and how to use CA; regulations on applying CA have not covered all types of electronic transactions... Mr. Nguyen Kho Din, General Director of the Enterprise Digital Transformation Platform Company under Bkav - Deputy Chairman, General Secretary of the Vietnam CA and E-Transaction Club, said that currently, applications and services accepting CA are still limited. Therefore, after people are granted CA, they do not know how to apply it.
Faced with this reality, the Law on Electronic Transactions 2023 (Law No. 20/2023/QH15) issued by the 15th National Assembly, effective from July 1, 2024, has devoted an entire Chapter III to electronic signatures and trusted services. This is an important legal corridor to promote the development of trusted services using digital signatures. In Ho Chi Minh City, the City People's Committee has directed in the 2023 development plan that 100% of administrative procedures must be eligible to be provided online. Online public services will be put into practice when using personal CAs to legalize people's digital records and processing results of state agencies.
Many remote CA authentication solutions via mobile devices have been developed by CA service providers. Currently, VNPT Group has built the VNPT SmartCA solution that allows digital authentication and certification to become easy using mobile applications. Individuals/citizens using VNPT SmartCA can completely replace handwritten signatures to quickly resolve administrative procedures such as birth registration, temporary residence registration, temporary absence registration, marriage, submitting health insurance and unemployment insurance applications, submitting education or school admission applications for children... on public service portals... VNPT SmartCA has been used by more than 200,000 teachers and doctors in professional work: lesson plans, electronic transcripts..., prescriptions, electronic medical records... helping to save 85% of time and costs compared to using traditional paper records, especially in the activities of creating, sending, storing, and searching for previous records.
Nearly 3 million CAs are active
To date, 100% of enterprises in Vietnam have used CAs mainly for services such as tax declaration, customs, social insurance, etc. According to statistics, by the end of August 2023, the country had more than 2.8 million active CAs, including nearly 1 million individual CAs. The free individual CA issuance campaigns alone - by the end of 2023 - had issued more than 260,000 individual CAs.
Source: https://nld.com.vn/pho-cap-chu-ky-so-ca-nhan-196240109215541779.htm
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