Giorgi Vashadze

Giorgi Vashadze,  the Deputy Minister of Justice; Head of the Civil Registry Agency in Georgia, an independent one-stop agency created in 2005 under the Ministry of Justice, discusses the agency's responsibility for issuing citizen identifications, voter registrations, passports, marriage licenses and divorce papers, name changes, and birth and death certificates.  The agency is partially supported by the fees it collects from citizens applying for papers.  The goal is to make it entirely self-supporting financially in the near future.  He describes how the Civil Service Registry was established to eliminate a predecessor process that was highly corrupt and paper-based, and he notes that the process has been computerized and almost all corruption eliminated from the system. The objective in creating the registry was to create a one-stop process for all important papers needed by citizens and to establish a system so that the government knew who was in the country. The system is linked to the process for driver’s licenses and to the Central Electoral Commission. The registry has helped other ministries eliminate corruption by providing software and links to a central information system.

 

Case Study:  Delivering on the Hope of the Rose Revolution: Public Sector Reform in Georgia, 2004-2009