ATHENS – More than three years into the reign of a Radical Left SYRIZA-led coalition, government websites designed to help citizens instead are often outdated and essentially useless in some cases.
The Athens think tank Diktio, in a report given to Kathimerini, said there are hundreds of inactive webpages of state entities and electronic systems, rendering them ineffective, according to the survey of the public administration for the first quarter of 2018.

The report was to be presented April 23 to political party leaders, relevant bodies and on the group’s website (www.todiktio.eu), showed a public administration in near-chaos, uncoordinated, fragmented and uneven.

The problem is complicated by frequent changes in ministries’ structures and names, in local government, and the need to promote specific projects, making many government websites just about unuseable.

One of the examples mentioned is the widely touted “Citizen’s Card,” which was supposed to allow citizens to use a digital signature but the report says the procedure to get it is just too complicated to use.

“The difficulties that someone encounters in trying to follow the instructions to get a digital signature are dissuasive, forcing many people to give up,” to Diktio said.

The Greek sites also often require people to uninstall some programs and browsers and use others to access them, driving people away in frustration, or even to switch to newer operating systems on their computers.

Millions of euros have been lost on systems that, due to state negligence, have been implemented with long delays, making them obsolete, without the possibility of upgrading them, the report said according to the paper.

“Our objective is not to be the opposition to the government, but to identify the problems in order to improve them,” the coordinator of Think Digitally Notis Paraskevopoulos told Kathimerini.

“Starting from the current situation, our experienced partners as well as citizens will help to highlight good practices and delays,” he added.