Today GTAC’s 2024 Public Economic Conference kicked off with a jam packed programme. The three day conference will be looking at how technology and data can be used to enhance government service delivery.
The conference was opened by Ronette Engela, Acting Head of GTAC. She said: “This event has great significance for us all. National Treasury and GTAC, launched the Public Economics Conference in 2016 with 250 people and today we have over 1000 people joining us. Today we are discussing the intersection of technology, data and service delivery. This is where [GTAC] wants to situate ourselves, our goal is to improve government service delivery. This conference reflects our commitment to harnessing technology and data to do this. Let us listen, learn and lead.”
The conference started with a fascinating conversation between Duncan Pieterse: Director General at National Treasury and Edward Kieswetter, SARS Commissioner. The two discussed the topic of “Harnessing Technology and Data: Shaping the future of South Africa’s public finances.”
Kieswetter started the conversation by highlighting that SARS insists on a clear purpose before developing a digital strategy, “We don’t start with their digital strategy, we start with the business strategy. You need clarity of purpose right up front. For us, it is always about using data and technology to enhance the experience of the tax payer. Our objectives are to make it clear and certain for taxpayers, we increasingly want to make tax a non-event and finally we want to detect and respond to non-compliance. You can also use digital transformation to solve the problems but you must be clear what problem you are trying to solve.”
He elaborated that SARS has added 14,5 million tax payers over the last 30 years and the workload stemming from this was huge. “Imagine we had to capture this and our assessment staff then had to produce an assessment outcome. We couldn’t do that successfully and this would have an impact on the country’s revenue.” As a result SARS looked to technology, machine learning and AI to reduce the workload and this resulted in SARS eliminating the need for five million taxpayers to submit a tax return. Their system uses only 3rd party data from banks, medical schemes, retirement schemes and payroll data to produce a tax assessment, which was accepted by 98% of eligible tax payers.
Duncan Pieterse emphasised that government thinks about digitisation in two ways, service delivery departments must think about how use data and analytics to enhance the service delivery experience for citizens that you serve. While policy departments, like National Treasury, its about how use data analytics to create better quality policies and using data to deliver better policy outcomes.
He pointed to the case study of the introduction of the Special Relief of Distress Grant (SRD). “Often a crisis situation can initiate quite significant changes from the state’s ability to leverage technology to have a good impact. SASSA with the help of other departments, transitioned to digital enrolment and verification. Enrolment was through WhatsApp and the website. On the verification side, they introduced innovations that weren’t there before.”
He highlighted that SASSA we were able to leverage other databases (UIF, Home Affairs and NSFAS) to harness power of administrative data that exists in the state to verify eligibility. He continued, “We were able to virtually means test a grant for first time, we introduced cross checking with commercial banks. Finally we were able to pay via EFT, so this was a major change in the social grant landscape and what is happening now, we are extending the lessons from SRD into other grants base. We are thinking about how we enrol and verify, eventually all grant recipients or UIF beneficiary will be on one database.” 
The conversation then moved onto how lessons learnt can be extend throughout government. Kieswetter explained that SARS is looking at how it can build on its fraud detection approach that uses machine learning and AI and to extend this technology into the verification component. He explained: “If it can be done better and faster using a script or code then let’s do that. But always start with the end in mind, which in our case is to raise additional taxes.”
He also pointed to the innovative system established to support the introduction of the Two-Pot Retirement System and that SARS allows retirement fund members to submit a withdrawal directive easily and for SARS to quickly process this directive and disburse the funds.
The conversation then turned to how National Treasury is using big data in policy making and economic modelling. Pieterse said: “Internally we have to have a lot of research and modelling capability to advise the minister, cabinet and parliament. In 2014 we were one of first countries in the world who started thinking about how to bring anonymised data to inform our work. In 2017 we introduced a data lab (in collaboration with SARS) and we now have panel data on tax payers over time and we can think through impact on labour market.”
Both Pieterse and Kieswetter advocated for unique digital identifier for each citizen, resident and business. “By using a single identifier we can see the connection to other databases. It will enable better tracking – this has to be driven by head of state,” explained Kieswetter.
Kieswetter also spoke about an exciting partnership with Home Affairs, where they are working develop a visa approval system, which produces a result in under five seconds like the tax assessment system. He also highlighted another project that SARS is working on with South African Reserve Bank to develop an instant payment system that has zero cost to client and near zero cost to service provider. He pointed to a similar initiative in Brazil which helped increase banking inclusion to 90%.
He finished by saying: “We need clarity of purpose and to build the right organisational environment. It is a whole of government approach, which requires policy and strong leadership and culture of collaboration – as each government department is working to his own agenda.”
Pieterse introduced a new project in Treasury which seeks to bring SEO procurement data into the National Treasury. He said: “Now we are starting to get this data and now compare with different data sets including PERSAL and we are getting interesting insights into government staff who are suppliers to government when they shouldn’t be. Next we want to make the data public, at a transaction level – we can then validate for value for money, see procurement trends and feed into procurement reforms. We gather data, set up system so that we can use the data for policy insights.”
Pieterse also covered some of the challenges with digital transformation. He said: “Availability of data scientists [is a challenge] – there are simply not enough data scientists available. We share these scare resources with SARS. Many government departments don’t have the core expertise to fully transition to adopt new digital infrastructure.”
The conversation finished on the topic of budgets required for the innovative use of technology. Kieswetter said: “We are spending far too little money on IT – in the next three years we need a billion rand per year but we can demonstrate that it has a huge return on investment. On another project we returned R22 billion on a R1 billion investment, where else does government get 63% back on an investment?”
The duo closed on their wish list for how technology can be used to deliver impact. Kieswetter said: “If I had a magic wand I would do two things, create a common government payment system and a common disbursement platform.”
This session was followed by the keynote address by Melanie Garson from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and University, College London. His address was titled “How build a 21st century government.”
She highlighted that the Covid-19 pandemic saw a spike in claims and the UK government didn’t have the personnel to process these claims and set about hiring more staff but by the time staff were onboard the pandemic spike had passed. This revealed the need for reimagining the state for the 21st century needs, “we need a state that reimagines government itself, how it operates for better citizen engagement.”
She highlighted that the 20th century state required a huge human effort to deliver services and had only a few tools for governing. “But there is a lack of faith in government, the government needs to be of service to people. The state has evolved in the past and it needs to do it again but deep reform is needed to entrenched approaches.”
She highlighted that in the developing world there is opportunity to avoid replicating old systems and leap frog to a 21st century state but the challenge is creating brand new systems. She highlighted that AI gives humans the power and knowledge of machines “the [digital] revolution is unprecedented in scale and scope and reshaping the very fabric of how we operate. We must put AI in the service of the state, use it to break through bureaucracy and create new connections and new opportunities.”
This was followed by sessions that covered continental perspectives on digital transformation and digital transformation scenarios for SA. Alison Gillwald: Executive Director, Research ICT Africa (RIA) and adjunct professor at University of Cape Town’s Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance said: “Digital transformation is a seismic shift that could result in greater equality or inequality. There is more evidence to illustrate that digital transformation is driving inequality, perpetuating historical inequalities. Digital inequality paradox lies in the fact that increasingly advanced technologies are being overlaid on existing digital inequalities and reflect deeper structural inequalities.”
She emphasised that: “AI is perpetuating historical injustices through invisibility, misrepresentation and discrimination of, particularly African people in advanced data-driven technologies such as being used to automated millions of decisions around the world daily.”
Lucienne Abrahams, Director, LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand looked at the value of AI in education. She said, “across the African environment, many institutions are not yet fit for purpose to build digital government extensively.”
This was followed by a panel discussion “How does government use AI and big data to forecast demand for public services, allocate resources effectively and address emerging needs of citizens? What are the wins, what are the unintended consequences?” Andrew Boulle, School of Public Health & Family Medicine, University of Cape Town presented on the use of (data and) AI in streamlining and optimising service delivery in healthcare. He said: “Joining the digital dots can really transform health service delivery. When people know that data is safe we can leverage our data assets to free up healthcare workers to care with the human touch.”
After lunch two spending reviews were presented on “Effectiveness of procuring the Gauteng Broadband Network Project through SITA” and “Improving the efficiency & effectiveness of spending on ICT in the Eastern Cape.”
James Rautenbach from Eastern Cape Treasury said: “The unequal expenditure across departments, personnel and systems and technology was marked. Lack of consistency with how IT is established. Lots of expenditure is around keeping the lights on and not on innovation. It showed us insourcing was more efficient, cheaper – so nice to see the need to invest in people. Expenditure is high, over the 5 year period we saw a decline in expenditure, so that is a concern. Need to focus our IT expenditure on returns.”
The next session looked at perspectives on digitising public sector service delivery: Sharing shortcomings, successes and strategies from other developing countries.
Bita Mortazavi: Inter-regional coordinator, UN Trade and Development presented a UNCTD tool which includes information on how to navigate government processes. Government delivers the information according to a user’s needs and includes cost and applicable laws, time frames, contact details and even opening times. She said: “This brings clarity for people on how to go about a procedure. It’s also an eye-opener for people in charge of different agencies and this often leads to changes in procedures and system.”
The final session was by Petra Digital Transformation Adviser at e-Estonia Briefing Centre. She shared Estonia’s unique approach to digital transformation and how the entire government has gone 99.9% digital. She shared the background to Estonia’s digital transformation. She shared the essential ingredients in digital transformation which include “a citizen-centric approach, once-only principle we don’t duplicate data needlessly, digital minded leadership to secure funding, internet access for everybody and individuals own their data and government reports to citizen on their data.”
To watch the full conference visit our YouTube page and to take a look at the presentations click here.