The Diet enacted Wednesday a package of six bills for digital reform, focusing on the creation of a government body to deal with digitization.
The bills cleared a plenary session of the House of Councillors on the day by a majority vote of the ruling camp and other parties, including Nippon Ishin no Kai.
Creating a digital agency has been a signature policy of the Cabinet of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. The aim is to achieve greater convenience for the public by unifying administrative systems, including those of local governments, and promoting digitization in the public and private sectors.
The bill to establish a digital agency stipulates that the agency will serve as an overall coordinator, with the right to make recommendations to other government ministries and agencies. It also says related budgets will be appropriated collectively, to remove bureaucratic sectionalism over unifying the administrative systems.
The prime minister will serve as the head of the agency. A new ministerial post in charge of promoting digitization will be created, as well as a special post to direct the agency, which will be the highest administrative position.
The government plans to launch the agency with about 500 staff members on Sept. 1 this year, recruiting more than 100 members from the private sector. The special administrative post also will be employed from the private sector.
The bill for a basic law to form a digital society stipulates the government's basic principles toward future digitization, including the responsibility of the central and local governments and of operators to promote the formation of a digital society. The current IT basic law will be abolished.
The bill for coordinating a digital society is aimed at abolishing the obligation to affix a seal in various administrative procedures and unifying the handling of personal information in line with central government standards. The handling of such information currently differs among the central and local authorities.
To heighten the spread of My Number personal identification cards, which the government considers key to promoting digitization, the bill also stipulates greater involvement of the central government in the Japan Agency for Local Authority Information Systems, the organization issuing the cards.
The bill for deposit and savings account registration, and another for deposit and savings account management, are aimed at making it possible to link the My Number system with deposit and savings accounts for such purposes as accelerating the provision of cash benefits in the event of a disaster.
The government intends to use the linkage system to provide benefits to low-income households with children as early as June.
Takuya Hirai, minister for digital transformation, said, "[The linkage system] would be a symbol showing the public that they can do things totally different from the past."
The bill for standardizing local government information systems stipulates that the central government will decide on standards to unify administrative systems, which vary among local governments.
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