E-Government in Malaysia: Its Implementation So Far and Citizen's Adoption Strategies

When we first mention about e-government, I believe that most people will connect and associate it with the new online income tax return system, namely e-filling. Nonetheless, the term e-government actually encompasses a much broader scope in which the government strives to improve its internal operation, provide information and services to the public more conveniently and efficiently, enhance the accessibility and quality of interactions with the public in all different kinds of departments. Since the launching of Malaysia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996, the implementation of e-government in Malaysia has jumped start and gathered pace as it is seen as one of the seven flagship applications of MSC to move Malaysia into the Information Age.

Briefly, the 7 pilot projects of our nation’s e-government flagship applications include:

1) Project Monitoring System – Monitor the entire lifecycle of the country’s national developmental programs.

2) Human Resources Management Information System – provide consolidated HR data such as best global HP practices for Malaysian Public Service

3) Generic Office Environment – a powerful web-based office management tool providing users the solutions to effectively and efficiently manage their office environment.

4) Electronic Procurement – enable suppliers to advertise, present pricing, process orders and deliveries and ultimately to sell goods and services to the government.

5) Electronic Services – allow public to conduct transactions with government agencies such as Road Transport Department and utilities companies such as TNB.

E.g. http://www.myeg.com.my/

6) Electronic Labour Exchange – one-stop-center for labor market information.

7) E-syariah – a case management system to improve the services of Syariah Courts.

During the early years of e-government implementation in Malaysia, as in accordance to a survey carried out by market information group TNS in 2003, citizen adoption is growing but at a slow pace. For instance, as shown in the study, about 15% of Malaysians have used online government services in 2003 as compared to 12% in 2002. Furthermore, Malaysia is ranked 25 out of 32 countries in terms of e government usage growth. Such slow growth rate can be attributed to inhibiting factors such as lack of public awareness, IT literacy, and citizen’s perceived security and privacy risks. Specifically, citizens are generally concerned about the security of e-services transactions as they are fearful that their credit card or banks account details are intercepted. In addition, privacy concern is also a major issue as citizens are worried that their specific personal information would be exploited by companies, government agencies and so forth.

Nonetheless, in the past few years, the government has been undertaking various initiatives to overcome the barriers of e-government implementation. For example, several cyber laws such as Personal Data Protection 2004 and Electronic Government Activities Act 2007 have been introduced to mitigate the security and data concern. Besides that, numerous advertisements on services such as MyEG have also been rolled out to increase the public awareness about the availability of online road tax renewal, driving license renewal and so forth.

Example of myeg online tax renewal form:

As a result, citizen’s adoption of e-government has been growing positively as according to survey done by Brown University in U.S in 2007, Malaysia was ranked 25 out of 198 countries in terms of international e-government ranking, leapfrogging from 157 in 2005! As evidence, Inland Revenue Board has announced that e-filing of income tax return has increased by 30% to 1.25 million in 2009, gradually increasing from 78,718 (2006) to 538,558 (2007) and 881,387(2008). Source: TheStar

If you’re interested to know more about income tax returns and e-filing, click here.