What is Budget 2024 doing for the digital economy?

BitDepth#1428

Mark Lyndersay

THE 2024 budget, read in Parliament on October 2 by Finance Minister Colm Imbert, leans in heavily on infrastructure.

The support documents – the Social Sector Investment Programme (SSIP) and Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP) – elaborate in detail on the strategic overview offered by the Finance Minister, which is expressed largely in concrete.

Interestingly, one item is only to be found in the budget speech, a tax exemption of $500,000, for companies who invest in cybersecurity.

The scattershot accounting in the budget of the myriad efforts to create a digital economy remains true in the 2024 budget documents, two years after the creation of the Ministry of Digital Transformation (MDT) and the appointment of a Cabinet-level advocate for the digital economy.

You'll find digital-transformation ideas scattered throughout the support documents. Alongside natterings about telemedicine and health information systems at the Ministry of Health, a digital skills development programme called WeLearnTT, and a continued commitment to TTWIFI, a persistently wrongheaded plan to bring 26 open-area, public-access sites of which no more than five are currently operational, despite efforts dating from 2016.

In his budget speech, the Finance Minister couldn't seem to reconcile the claims of de-facto state agency TSTT's claim of country coverage "approaching 100 per cent," and the availability of satellite-based Starlink services with lingering claims of "underserved areas."

A survey by the Telecommunications Authority (TATT) in 2022 revealed that just 0.12 of households are underserved by broadband connectivity (https://cstu.io/22b622). TATT's Universal Service Fund, raised through a licensing tax on telecommunications providers to the tune of more than $150 million, should be able to fix this shrinking problem.

The digitalisation of the public service continues with document scanning at Town and Country Planning, but there's been no move on the overdue digitalisation of the police service beyond plans to "operationalise body cams," a move largely stymied by reluctant officers.

The Three-Year Public Sector Investment Programme (3Y-PSIP) produced in 2022 to cover the government's strategic planning for the years 2023-2024, proposes bolder changes to the service, including: "A resource shift towards enterprise reporting systems, virtual meetings, investigations using access rooms and redeployment of human capital to higher-level skill sets."

The PSIP allocates $15 million to body cameras while gesturing rather vaguely in the direction of digital fingerprint capture and a planned expansion of the police computing network.

In a document that offers detailed boasts of the concrete to be poured for police building refurbishment – and even proudly includes a photo of side-by-side sit toilets installed at the San Fernando Administration building, built without benefit of a modesty divider – this lack of clarity is confusing.

There is no clarity about computer systems, management systems for firearms user's licences and property rooms, computerisation of the crime scene photo lab, server room upgrades. Nothing is said about the proposed deployment of closed-circuit television systems and a half-dozen other initiatives outlined for the police in the 3Y-PSIP.

The gaps between planning and execution, even for critical matters like gathering accurate statistical information about governance, remains a hallmark of the sprawl of government budget documents.

The National Statistical Institute of TT (NSITT) was first proposed as a replacement to the Central Statistical Office (CSO) in a 2018 bill. The CSO has been hamstrung by its inability to access governance datasets and increasingly limited resources.

The idea of the NSITT still haunts budget documents, but the planned Population and Housing Census in 2024 will be managed by a last-gasp CSO. The last census was done in 2011.

The formation of the MDT was expected to herald a new commitment to digital transformation in TT, but a comparison of the ambitions of the 3Y-PSIP with this year's document suggests a dramatic scaling-down of ambitions.

The current emphasis of the MDT appears to be on implementing a national electronic identification system (e-ID), even if the minister doesn't miss an opportunity to celebrate fresh concrete when a new public internet access centre is opened.

The e-ID system, a proposed government cloud and the implementation of a cybersecurity strategy have attracted the largest budget allocation to the MDT, at $50 million.

But the e-ID project alone is likely to demand the focus of the MDT entire, if it hopes to implement it before the next election.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there.