The following is excerpted from an interview with Taro Kono, minister in charge of administrative reform.
I want to focus on regulatory reforms to create new value in the eyes of the public. On Thursday, I launched a "direct control team" [under myself] in order to get things moving wherever it is possible. Staff members appointed by local governments will also be asked to join the team and take the lead on regulatory reforms.
Digital Transformation Minister Takuya Hirai will not be able to act unless regulations that hinder the digitization of society are removed. We will cooperate closely to narrow down the priority areas. We will not be able to move forward if we do not remove [requirements for] seals and signatures on papers as soon as possible.
Of administrative procedures that are carried out 10,000 times or more annually, there are approximately 800 categories that require seals on application forms and accompanying documents. Of these, there were 35 categories for which [ministries and agencies] said they could not "abolish" or "consider abolishing" the seals. I am pushing back on them because I think they may all be unnecessary. All we have to do is change the laws, government and ministry ordinances, and public notices. Seals for internal documents in government agencies are also hardly necessary.
Eliminating seals alone would increase convenience, and that would also lead to the next step: Printing out papers would also become unnecessary. Abolishing seals is an intermediate step. In the future, the necessity of the procedures themselves would also be reviewed. Viewing it as a 400-meter relay, the first runner has now just started out.
I want to make visible the ways national civil servants work. They say they cannot spend time with their families and do not find the job appealing in terms of self-development. So we will analyze why this is the case and what changes are desirable. I have instructed [the ministries and agencies] to first precisely look into their working hours for October and November.
For the time being, the reorganization of ministries and agencies will have to wait. The Health, Labour and Welfare Ministry is facing various tasks in response to the novel coronavirus, so the timing is not very good for putting that ministry on the cutting board.
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