President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. is bent on digitalizing government processes and transactions particularly in the Bureau of Customs (BOC) in a bid to curb rampant smuggling in the country.
Marcos noted that more modernized data and transaction handling could aid the nation's economic development.
In an interview, the President said the country has to solve the issue of unabated smuggling in which almost all kinds of commodities are being shipped to the country illegally.
He said It might be helpful to look into successful approaches being employed by several countries and apply them to the Philippines.
He tagged the digitalization of the BOC as an important part of achieving a digital bureaucracy under his administration.
The chief executive also called for drastic bureaucratic reforms to fight smuggling, which he said threatens local industries and affects government tax collection.
One of the recommendations earlier raised was opening up the database to the BOC and to the Department of Agriculture (DA) to ensure the efficient sharing of information.
The DA and BOC have a data-sharing agreement (DSA) that seeks to facilitate the exchange of information on traded agricultural products.
The DSA, which is governed by the Philippines' Data Privacy Act, is one of the agreements forged between the DA and BOC to ensure that local agri-fishery products remain competitive.
Through the program, each agency can promptly share and act upon critical and intelligence information.
In a recent dialog at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, Marcos said that although structural changes in the bureaucracy is quite painful, they have to be carried out, and digitalization is going to play a large part in that process.