New digital services available to citizens through the new Social Insurance System have been presented by Minister of Labour and Social Insurance Marinos Moushouttas and Deputy Minister of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy, Nicodemos Damianou, with the latter noting that application processing time has been reduced, depending on the service, by between 30% and 70%.
The new services cover Paternity Allowance, Maternity Allowance, Maternity Grant, Parental Leave Allowance and Funeral Grant — benefits which, as noted, are linked to critical moments in citizens’ lives and are now provided through a more modern, simple and secure digital environment. At the same time, an Insured Person Profile has been introduced, giving citizens access through a single central point to their personal information, applications and relevant data. Applications for Invalidity Pension, Widow’s/Widower’s Pension, Disablement Benefit and the Special Benefit for Persons with Thalassaemia can also now be submitted electronically.
In his address, the Minister of Labour and Social Insurance Moushouttas said that “the digital transformation we are implementing is an investment for the decades ahead”, noting that, in practice, the changes mean “fewer supporting documents, fewer trips to government offices, faster application processing and a better service experience for citizens”. Moushouttas said that “the true measure of the success of any reform is not how advanced the technology is, but how much easier it makes the lives of the people who use it”.
In his address, Deputy Minister of Research, Innovation and Digital Policy Damianou said that “the new Social Insurance System lies at the heart of the broader effort to digitally transform the state”, adding that “the results are already measurable: for the benefits presented today, application processing time has been reduced, depending on the service, by between 30% and 70%”.
Damianou said that more than 135,000 student registrations and transfers were carried out through the eDEA system, while 16,000 Clean Criminal Record certificates were issued through Digipol in the past three months alone. Overall, he said, more than 242,000 uses of individual digital services were recorded over the past 12 months.
He also referred to specific examples of reductions in application processing times. For Maternity Allowance, the median processing time fell from 12 to six days, while for the Maternity Grant it declined from 90 days — before the introduction of the electronic service in 2022 — to around 12 days, and now to just three days under the new process.
As noted at the press conference, the services presented concern a large number of citizens, with more than 40,000 applications submitted each year for these specific benefits. Of these, more than 17,000 relate to Parental Leave Allowance, while more than 7,000 applications for Maternity Allowance and the Maternity Grant were submitted over the past 12 months.
The two Ministers stressed that this presentation represents an important step in the digitalisation programme, rather than the end of the process. The project is being implemented within the framework of the Recovery and Resilience Plan.
(Source: CNA)
