Bangkok (VNA) – Thailand’s Finance Ministry and Social Development and Human Security Ministry are preparing to jointly improve the database of government welfare systems to ensure greater transparency in terms of data and reduce the number of bogus applicants.
Deputy Finance Minister Julapun Amornvivat said information regarding welfare provided by the government should be consolidated now because many problems have arisen.
For example, during the first phase of the “digital wallet” programme, authorities struggled to determine whether those who received 10,000 THB (300 USD) cash handouts are eligible beneficiaries or not.
This raised concerns regarding the cleanliness of the data, so the government wants to gather all welfare data together in one place, he said.
Thus, the Thai cabinet has assigned the Social Development and Human Security Ministry to carry out this task with the coordination from the Comptroller General's Department, which will be responsible for gathering information on the welfare database, including the location and how to connect the databases together.
He said that such a database is crucial for studying the Negative Income Tax (NIT), which the Finance Ministry wishes to use as a system for providing welfare to low-income individuals.
In fiscal year 2023, budget allocation for welfare programmes accounted for as much as 67.1% of the total budget expenditure for the year./.
