Portal of the Social Protection Fund of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection

Pre-implementation situation

In the structure of the Fund are the Central administrative office, 6 regional departments and Minsk City Department; 149 offices in cities and regions. The main purposes are - organizes and coordinates the activities on accumulating financial resources of state social insurance and their management; performs collection and accumulation of compulsory insurance payments, finances payment of retirement and occupational pensions and allowances, as well as other social insurance expenses; organizes and performs individual (personalized) record keeping on insurance holders.
The large-scale workflow associated with this functional, previously occurred on paper. The main reasons for implementation were:

• heavy work-load to the employee in the period of quarterly and annual reporting of all economic operators of the Republic of Belarus (legal persons and sole proprietors);
• very long queues due to Fund inspectors had to enter an enormous amount of documents from electronic carriers;
• information exchange between the Social Protection Fund of the Population and other state authorities took place in paper-based format.

In this case it was decided to organize web-portal for providing efficient information exchange related to personalized record keeping and reporting, for establish secure communications between information systems of the Fund, allow payers to send their reports in self-service mode in electronic form and give them the possibility to receive the response on sent data processing results through the portal.

Solution

The portal provides secure remote interaction with the information resources of the Fund of data suppliers and consumers.
As a matter of fact, the portal undertook the function of transporting mechanism for integrating disparate heterogeneous information resources of the Fund and organizing an omnipurpose electronic document workflow mechanism:

• between the Fund and the payers of compulsory insurance payments;
• between the Fund and the payers of occupational pension provision;
• between the Fund and other public administration authorities;
• between the structure subdivisions of the Social Protection Fund itself.

The portal allows to send into the Fund all the documents that are necessary for personalized record keeping, occupational pension insurance, for providing information needed for pension assignment, and others. At the present time, virtually all legal persons and sole proprietors of the Republic of Belarus have become users of the portal. These economic operators pay salaries to their employees and, therefore, pay deductibles into the Fund. Basing on these deductibles, employees receive payments for sick leaves, children’s allowances and other benefits, and when they reach the retirement age, their pensions are calculated and assigned depending on it.
The portal of the Fund maintains information interaction with the following information resources: system for processing personalized accounting documents, payer report processing,  occupational pension insurance management and others.
From functional, technical and technological points of view, the portal is divided into two nodes: the internal one and the external one. Subsystems and functional complexes are hosted on the external node, and access to them is performed via a specialized Internet channel. Users of the system comprise insurance contribution payers, employees of Fund subdivisions in districts and regions, local courts and employees of the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection
From the technical point of view, the portal developed by Novacom has three-level architecture (client/application server, database server). More than 40 virtual servers based on 10 physical servers and a set of other technical equipment perform the functions of specific portal elements, and deliver solutions of information security and workload balancing issues. The servers are located in the internal data center of the Fund data center. Development of platform on Oracle has been performed by using Java and PL/SQL portlets.

Results

• The workload on employees of the Fund that perform interaction with insurance contribution payers has been considerably decreased. The portal allowed to relieve the Fund departments in regions and districts from processing large volumes of documents in reporting periods.
• Insurance contribution payers no longer need to make visits to the Fund in order to hand in reports in paper format and on electronic carriers. Now they don’t need to stand in long queues in order to hand in their reports. The Fund has received considerable positive feedback from the payers.
• A unified centralized control system has been implemented. Earlier on, sometimes the document could pass control on the levels of regions and districts and fail the check in the central base. Now the documents pass the control procedures in the central base from the very beginning.
• The time required for state authorities to receive data from the databases of the Fund has been considerably reduced.
• The amount of ingoing and outgoing paper documentation in the Fund has been decreased. The document workflow completely shifted to electronic form.