Savings from administrative procedure reform

Simplifying and reforming administrative procedures aim to save time, costs and effort for people and businesses.

Every step eliminated from a procedure brings value. Saving just one hour in processing a single application, when multiplied across thousands or tens of thousands of applications, can free up a significant amount of society’s time. For businesses, this reduces opportunity costs and accelerates investment, production and business activities. For individuals, it cuts travel, printing and photocopying expenses, as well as the time they have to take off work to complete paperwork. More importantly, they will have more time for work, family and everyday life.

However, in practice, there are still cases where procedures have been streamlined on paper, yet people are required to make multiple trips because applications are not properly integrated, data is not shared among agencies, or instructions are inconsistent. Although online public services are available, some still involve complicated procedures, requiring people to repeatedly provide information that government agencies already have. People’s time and effort can also be unnecessarily consumed by requests for an additional copy, a confirmation, a signature or supplementary documents that the responsible agency could have verified proactively.

According to the August 2026 task performance report of the Standing Office of the Provincial Steering Committee 57, the province has simplified 1,617 administrative procedures, accounting for 58.52% of the total number of procedures reviewed. However, the report also noted that several difficult, inter-sectoral tasks remain problematic because they depend on infrastructure, data, human resources, funding, and the coordination progress of relevant agencies.

To save people’s and businesses’ time, costs, effort and even opportunities, it is necessary to review every stage of the process, eliminate unnecessary paperwork, make use of data already held by the State, strengthen inter-agency connectivity, and design public services based on the principle of “provide information once, use it many times.”

The effectiveness of administrative reform must be measured by actual results, rather than simply by the number of procedures cut or reduced. A locality may report a very high rate of online applications, but if people still have to visit a government office to complete a certain step, the goal of saving time and effort has not yet been achieved. The ultimate benchmarks must be the actual time, money, and effort people save.

When administrative reform is truly practical and people-centered, it will generate real savings and create greater development opportunities.

Le Duy