The Guyana Government is aiming to introduce laws in the new year to better govern electronic transactions and payments, Attorney General Anil Nandlall has announced.
According to him, the government will introduce in the National Assembly the E-Transaction and E-Payment Bills which will allow citizens to make payments via their debit and credit cards in a more secure and comfortable environment.
“E-Transaction/E-Payment Bills are also two pieces of legislation that will also come on stream, 2023. This is where we are going to introduce and allow for the use of plastic, in public institutions, payments. We have to move in that direction, dispense with money and so on and use cards in the public sector,” he explained during his programme “Issues in the News”.
The introduction of these bills will support government’s drive to develop a Single Window System, for which legislation has already been presented to the National Assembly.
The implementation of the Single Window System Bill will allow citizens to conduct all of their necessary transactions with government agencies through one source.
The Bill is structured in a way that will ensure citizens get to conduct services swiftly and efficiently within a specific timeframe, which will aid in eradicating constant delays, maladministration and also bribery and corruption.
Nandlall explained that if a document is sent to a specific agency and is not completed within the given timeframe, it will automatically be considered as approved.
“This Bill has a mechanism that when it goes to a particular office, if it stays there within a particular time frame and it is not dealt with by that…agency, it is deemed to be granted. Whatever that agency had to do, the law says, it will be presumed that it was granted, and the application moves on,” Nandlall stressed.
Meanwhile, it is only recently that the Guyana Register Office (GRO) and Immigration Support Services implemented their e-payment options through Mobile Money Guyana (MMG).
This system was launched to allow persons to make online payments for transactions conducted with the agencies, so as to save time and have services offered to them more efficiently.
