Digital notification platform, what is the Pnrr project that will make registered letters disappear

Digital notification platform

There will be work in the summer, to turn on the digital notification platform in time. That is, the system that revolutionizes the way citizens are sent those legal documents of public offices which today are sent only by registered mail or certified e-mail (pec), because it is necessary to have certainty of receipt. Like fines, for example. The Digital Notification Platform is one of the most anticipated projects among those financed by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr), which has allocated 200 million to the box, and one of the first to go on the launch pad. By December 2023, at least 800 Municipalities will have to send notices through the digital notification platform to meet their commitments with the European Commission.

On the other hand, the Municipalities are all tempted by the infrastructure entrusted to PagoPa, the company owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Mef), because it promises to cut costs and times of notifications of fines, taxes or other acts for which it is necessary to be 100% sure that the citizen has received the notice. Already 5,121 municipalities have joined the first tender of 80 million euros, launched last September and almost doubled, in October, with another 70 million euros. There are still 51.7 million left in the pot.

The project:

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How the Digital Notification Platform works

The Digital Notification Platform (Pnd) project was launched in 2022. When it will be operational, it will change the way public bodies and citizens manage public documents and registered letters. Let's take a practical example: Mario Rossi gets a fine for entering a restricted traffic area in Bugliano (the most famous fictional town on Twitter) without paying. Rossi has five days to pay a reduced amount. If he does not provide, the Municipality of Bugliano takes over the debt. But instead of sending the paper sanction home, he deposited the deed on the digital notification platform, which records the date and time of the upload and information on the recipient.

At that point, Pnd starts looking for Mario Rossi to warn him that got a fine. The research “ is based on an essential fact, that is the tax code ”, explained Federica Amoroso, account manager of PagoPa, in a course held by the school of the National Association of Italian Municipalities (Anci). If he has a digital domicile, such as a pec, he sends him a certified email message at least twice with the link to the digital notification platform to view the deed. In parallel, a courtesy notification is triggered. It can be a message on the Io app of public administration services (always from the PagoPa team) or a text message. If the digital sending is not successful, for example because the pec mailbox is full, the Digital Notification Platform sends out a simple registered letter. Citizens who do not have a digital domicile, however, will receive the usual registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt.

According to Gianpiero Zaffi Borgetti, head of services to the Municipalities of the local finance department of Anci, the platform changes “the concept of notification ”. While before, as he explained in the seminar of the association of Municipalities, "to notify a deed I have to send it, in the case of the notification platform I will have notified the deed if the deed is filed on the platform and if I manage to communicate it to the 'interested ”.

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Expected benefits

But the Digital Notification Platform is not only concerned with delivering the notices. It also keeps all the documents, creating a specific drawer dedicated to the single recipient. And it is the Pnd that keeps the documents of untraceable people in its belly for ten years, instead of distributing them among the archives of the last Municipality of residence or of the public prosecutor (in the case of judicial documents) and forcing the institution to continue notify it, with obvious waste of time and resources.

For the municipalities, the greatest advantages are in terms of time, disputes and costs. Let's start with the first ones. If Mario Rossi decides to receive the communication via pec, within seven days of sending the notice, once it has reached its destination, it is acknowledged as received. If it is necessary to switch to paper channels, the window is fifteen days. While for those who prefer to receive the classic registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt, the processing time is ten days from receipt of the notice. The expectation is that the same acceleration will also be reflected in payments, which today take two months on average. PagoPa and AppIo will be directly integrated on the notification platform.

With the certainty of delivery, the problem of disputes is also eliminated. According to the Revenue Agency, they cost around 55 million a year. “ Collection is negatively impacted by the contentious nature of the notification process ”, explained Zaffi Borgetti.

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Cost question

And then there are the out-of-pocket costs. An even more interesting item for the mayors besieged by budget cuts, because savings are estimated at 50 million. Since the management of the documents passes from the Municipalities to the digital notification platform, the costs of printing paper notices, interrogation of platforms such as the national certified email index (if an address needs to be found) or of municipal messengers to be sent to the home. And the costs of individual notifications are also lowered: 2 euros for digital notifications, 3.33 for registered letters with acknowledgment of receipt and 7.43 for those pursuant to law 890 for judicial documents.

The Pnrr, then, it covers the assignment of contracts to connect the management of the Municipality to Pnd. 70 IT companies have been selected to link local software to the platform. Contracts with suppliers had to be closed by 3 April, but given the tight deadlines, an extension was granted until 31 May. Deda Next, the public administration arm of the digital Deda group, is one of the companies on board. “Our strategy is to use the software of the protocol office as a hub for hooking up to the Pnd - explains Luigi Zanella, head of business development & innovation at Deda Next -. Since all the documents that go out are logged, I use it as a point of contact and then let the protocol interface with the management systems of the other offices internally. Where it is not possible, as in the case of fines, which are not logged, we make a direct connection ”.

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Marathon in Municipalities

“ From the moment the contract is signed, there are 180 days to complete the developments - explains Zanella -. The Municipalities will have to keep open in the summer to develop integration ". On pain of losing funding. It is no small effort. According to a projection by Deda Next, a third of the approximately 150 million already allocated goes to over 2,200 Municipalities under 2,500 inhabitants. Another 23 million for those between 2,500 and 5,000 and 45 million in the 5-20,000 inhabitants range. Large cities, with over 250,000 residents, take less than a million.

In order not to go too far with the final targets year, it is necessary to work not only on the Pnd, but also on the conditions necessary to get the platform off the ground, such as the fact that fines can be paid via PagoPa. The notice for allocating funds for digital notifications requires town halls to bring at least two documents on board the platform and that one of these is road fines. But for everything to work, it is necessary that they can be paid with the fintech service of the public administration. According to data from the Department of Digital Transformation, of the more than five thousand Municipalities interested in Pnd, only 1,470 already allow fines to be paid with PagoPa and have relied on suppliers who are among those chosen for the digital notification platform. Another 992 have Pnd extra-pink partners. And 2,569 lack the connection between fines and PagoPa.

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The national data platform

The race to turning on the platform fits in with the other marathons to spend the Pnrr money on digital in time. This entails a bottleneck on the market, because, as sector operators explain to sportsgaming.win confidentially, the market is struggling to keep up with this wave of tenders. In July, however, the National Cybersecurity Agency will release its new rules for qualifying software for public administration. They will be more stringent and it is expected that many suppliers who today have the stamp of the Agency for Digital Italy (Agid) will lose it. And then there is the question of maintaining these services beyond 2026, when the Pnrr season will end.

In recent weeks, the Municipalities are also involved in the launch of another national platform paid for by the Pnrr. It is that of data, a system for exchanging information between public bodies. Instead of forcing the citizen to repeat the same data in dozens of forms, the administrations will make the databases dialogue. The INPS, for example, can open that of subsidies with the Municipalities to manage welfare services. But among the use cases imagined by the Department for digital transformation there is also the exchange of registered data, geographical information, transparency data and the praetorian register. In the future, the Municipalities will be able to enter the national digital data platform, scroll through the catalog and identify the interfaces to connect to. There are already 215 organizations that have joined. On May 19, the second tender for 110 million to finance the project in the Municipalities expires. And there are still almost 35 million available.