A Second Life For One-Stop Shops: Citizen Services In Minas Gerais, Brazil, 2003-2013

Abstract
In 2003, the new governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil, pledged to improve government efficiency and serve citizens better. Residents of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s fourth-largest state by area and second largest by population, had long bemoaned the difficulty of obtaining such vital documents as work permits, passports, and driver’s licenses, which are issued by a variety of federal, state, and local agencies. In 1996, the state government tried to solve the problem by experimenting with 26 one-stop shops that integrated related citizen services under a single roof, but the shops failed to reduce delay and confusion. From 2007 to 2010, the governor and his reform team restructured and expanded the one-stop shops. The reform team persuaded multiple levels of the government to cooperate more closely, revamped management practices, improved the physical appearance and organization of facilities, streamlined procedures, and installed an electronic monitoring system. Renamed integrated citizen assistance units (unidades de atendimento integrado), the new one-stop shops improved services, reduced delays, and sharply increased processing volume. In 2011, the team outsourced the management of six of the one-stop shops to a private company monitored by the state. The public-private experiment cut per-unit operating costs by 31%. By 2012, 30 one-stop shops were handling more than 6 million citizen transactions annually—more than seven times the annual volume in 2009. By bringing together diverse agencies from multiple levels of government, Minas Gerais was able to greatly improve the reach and efficiency of its citizen services.
 
Rushda Majeed drafted this case study based on interviews conducted in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, in May 2013. The case was prepared by ISS in partnership with the World Bank as a part of the Bank's Science of Delivery initiative. Case published January 2014. 
 
Keywords
public-private partnership
process reengineering
process streamlining
change management
organizational change
Belo Horizonte
Minas Gerais
Brasil
Brazil
Fernanda Valadares Couto Girão
Renata Maria Paes de Vilhena
Antônio Augusto Junho Anastasia
Aécio Neves da Cunha
Minas Fácil
Projeto Estruturador Descomplicar
MGS
Minas Gerais Administration and Services
Integrated Citizen Assistance Units
UAI
Unidades de Atendimento Integrado
Programa Empressa Mineira Competitiva
PSIU
Postos de Serviço Integrado Urbano
SEPLAG
coordination
bureaucratic structure
decentralization
Information sharing
institutional capacity
delegation
monitoring
governance
one-stop shop
Focus Area(s)
Civil Service
Building a Reform Team and Staff
Critical Tasks
Evaluating performance
Inter-ministerial coordination
One-stop shops
Performance management system
Public management reform
Core Challenge
Principal-agent problem (delegation)
Country of Reform
Brazil
Type
Case Studies
Author
Rushda Majeed