Permits, benefits and certificates without queues, phone calls and paper envelopes are brought by a new intervention in the Civil Service that allows some 30 frequently requested documents to be replaced with a declaration of identity.

The administration is moving forward immediately and the audit is done after the fact, ending years of inconvenience for citizens and departments.
The regulation presented at a press conference by Deputy Prime Minister Kostis Hatzidakis changes the philosophy of administrative procedures, as it establishes as a rule that a case does not “stick” because the state itself cannot immediately draw a certificate.

The citizen fills in a solemn declaration in a template provided by the administration, on paper or digitally, and from the moment of its submission, the competent authority immediately issues the administrative act, certificate, permit or certificate.

The procedure concerns documents that are currently not or incompletely extracted through interoperability and are frequently requested, such as marriage or death certificates, certificates of guarantor relatives, citizenship certificates, diplomas and degrees, as well as various cadastral and property certificates required for subsidies, transfers, housing schemes or other administrative acts. It also covers cases where birth or marital status data are not correctly or fully extracted from digital registers, as well as documents of special personal status.

The verification of the accuracy of the declared data is not abolished, but is postponed in time. The administration is obliged to carry out an ex-post and ex-officio check by searching for the required data from the State databases within a certain period of time. It is expressly provided that affidavits that are manifestly unfounded will not be accepted and will be rejected on the spot by the department.

At the same time, mandatory digital information for citizens on the progress of their application is introduced. The person concerned will be able to know whether the file has been submitted in full, what stage the procedure is at, which service or which employee is handling it and what the estimated processing time is, without phone calls, emails or physical presence at the services.

Penalties for false statements

The new framework comes with strict safeguards.

Increased administrative and criminal penalties are provided for false declarations, with fines and penalties linked to the illegal benefit the declarant is attempting to obtain. Those who have been convicted of making a false declaration lose the right to use this facility, with the relevant control being carried out through the administration’s interface with the Criminal Register and the National Communication Register.

The intervention is of a transitional nature and will be in force until the interoperability of the public information systems is fully completed. Until then, the order of things is changing: first the citizen’s case proceeds and then the control is done, aiming for less bureaucracy, more transparency and faster service.