My EG – where did the My comes from?

ARCHIVES 2011

By admin-s On Mar 5, 2011

Are we still paying for excessive number of civil servants while some of their jobs have been outsourced?

By Lee Wee Tak

MyEG is currently on the roll now. Its financial results are looking good. It looks to provide a positive image to the government’s modernization initiative and enable IT savvy Malaysians to handle mundane transactions without needing to travel and queue.

According to Malaysia123.com

MyEG Services Berhad is a concessionaire for the Malaysian E-Government MSC Flagship Application. MyEG role as a Service Provider for the E-Services component essentially provides the electronic link between the Government and citizens/businesses

Through MyEG portal, MyEG offer the Malaysian public a single point of contact between the Government and the people it serves. MyEG portal enables Malaysians to dynamically interact with numerous agencies within the Federal, State and the Local Government machinery providing services ranging from information searches to licence applications.
Turnover and profits are on increasing trend for this listed company:

Effectively MyEG is

1) given a monopoly of handling e-government transactions; and

2) given access into private and confidential details of many Malaysians including credit card details, telephone numbers, addresses, traffic summons etc

Several matters pop into my mind.

If 1Malaysia -Performance-Now administration can outsource the “accounts receivable” function of JPJ, DBKL, Imigresen etc then how come we Malaysians are saddled with the most bloated civil service around?

Best Bloated Civil Service

In 2009, Malaysia’s civil servants-to-population ratio was highest in Asia Pacific. Her ratio was 4.68%, compared to Indonesia’s 1.79%, Korea’s 1.85% and Thailand’s 2.06% all of which have less than half our ratio.

With 1.3 million civil servants to a population of 26 million, Malaysia has one of the highest civil servants-to-population ratio in the world by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development standards.

In 2009, Singapore had a total of 60,000 civil servants, i.e., 1.5% of the total population. Hong Kong had 160,000 out of a population of 7 million (2.3%). Taiwan(population of 23 million) was served by only 528,000 (2.3%).

So the question is, are Malaysians paying double? Are we still paying for excessive number of civil servants while some of their jobs have been outsourced?

In addition, what kind of clause, terms and conditions did the Barisan Nasional administration bound the rakyat into? As tax payers’ surely we have the rights to know. The audited accounts of MyEg merely included the statement:

We can’t tell how we are being charged by MyEG, can we? Besides, were there open tenders called to ensure Malaysians got the best deal? Why MyEG was chosen? What are the safety procedures in place to ensure our private and confidential information submitted is not being abused?