Much of the direct benefits to citizens results from lowering the cost of transactions with the government or providing information for new queries or transactions:

Financial transactions: Merkava provides a platform for back office processing of citizen and business transactions.

Payment Server – The public accesses the payments server online for most remittances to the government. The server connects directly to the government accounting system in Merkava and with banks and credit card companies. The payments can be made by credit card or direct withdrawal from bank accounts. The system currently processes approximately 120,000 transactions per month, with payments totaling NIS 4 Billion/year (10 percent of total collections). Over 30 percent of these transactions occur between 7-11 p.m., which indicates that the transactions formerly requiring citizens to visit government offices are shifting online.

The government does not collect data on the cost or staff savings resulting from the use of this payment system. However, the e-government system collects survey data on citizen satisfaction: a larger sample survey of 2,000 users quarterly plus a short satisfaction survey at the end of each transaction. The surveys show high levels of satisfaction (over 90 percent) and help identify problems or areas for new development.

Procurement Server – The e-government program established a procurement server to support online reverse auctions for purchasing. Qualified vendors receive a tender and instructions for participating online. The auction is open only to registered vendors who submit bids and see the current pricing. New bids can be submitted at will until one stands for a pre-arranged length of time (e.g., 30 minutes), closing the auction. The second use of this server was underway during the site visit, allowing the study team to observe it in action for a PC procurement in real time. During the observation time, the offered price for the PC order worked downward rapidly, ending at less than ½ the previous price for comparable equipment. This server is not yet linked directly to the Merkava procurement module, so measurements of returns are not yet available.

Information transactions: These include government obtaining information from citizens, via forms, and individuals seeking information from the government.

Forms Server – A forms server allows citizens and organizations to submit information to the government by completing applications and other government forms online. The forms server is not currently integrated with Merkava. Merkava provides value for citizens and organizations seeking information about financial transactions, both in terms of transparency about government decisions and about the status of specific claims or subsidies. These include vendors seeking status of orders and payments and citizens seeking status of payments due or eligibility for grants and subsidies. The e-government program also plans to implement a secure authenticatable email system to replace registered mail. This would lower the cost to citizens of obtaining or submitting legal documents. This is not currently linked to Merkava but represents another public return that can eventually be linked through the ERP infrastructure. Savings to the government or citizens from use of these services has not been documented.

The connection between service delivery through the e-government program and the Merkava project is made complex by the large scope of both, the many possible connections between them, and the difficulty of coordinating diverse development activities. The e-government program is organizationally separate from the Merkava project, but still within the Ministry of Finance and under the authority of the Accountant General’s office. At present e-government focuses primarily on the services mentioned above plus an internal government portal for secure internet access from government computers and a secure intranet for agencies. These are primarily front-office services, on the interface between the government and its customers, or the infrastructure that directly supports those services. Merkava is the back-office system for the internal operations of the agencies. The back-office foundation will eventually link to direct services, as some do now. In the interim, however the development paths will be partially independent. Thus the full value of Merkava as an external service delivery platform has yet to be realized.