The country is collectively wasting time waiting in lines to pay bills.
This frank assertion came from Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Ryan Straughn, who said it was time for fundamental and transformational reform, moving from “the administrative process of dealing with the time that it takes to deal with these queues, which can be dealt with and delivered online”.
“So whether it is government or the private sector, you only have to come to the office for a real problem and we are working hard to transition to this as soon as possible,” he stressed.
Yesterday, during the debate on the Land Tax (Amendment) Bill, 2019, he noted such a move was necessary to reduce the loss of productive hours spent queuing up trying to pay bills physically.
He stated through the reform, Barbadians would not only be forced to change their behaviour, but their expectations of service in both the public and private sectors.
“We all have to up our game with respect to how we better deliver service. We have to engage our constituents and stakeholders so that as we go along this path of modernisation and digitisation so that that the very limited resources that we do have can be focused on actually delivering a service rather than collecting money and therefore then we can have a much more efficient use of people’s time and citizens can therefore go and spend their time doing something more productive rather than standing up in a government office in a line to pay and we too would have the capacity to pay citizens seamlessly without worrying about a cheque,” he said.
Straughn added this was one of the major reforms under the Barbados Economic Recovery Transformation program. (JMB)