Diario Libre, in its page two editorial commentary by Ines Aizpun, has suggestions on how the government can make savings instead of increasing taxes. She says that just recently a governmental mission traveled to Chile to study how the Chilean government uses the Internet to make government purchases. Aizpun comments that the mission consisted of: the Presidency’s director general for information technology, the Presidency’s purchasing director, the Ministry of Finance administrative director, the Central Bank’s deputy services and systems director and the Attorney General office’s purchasing director. She questions whether it might have been cheaper and more modern and timely if the information needed had been obtained through the Internet. As these days people can even obtain their doctorates by Internet, Aizpun wonders whether the thousands of dollars spent on this trip might have been saved.
“The awarding of contracts without tender, the overvaluing of purchases, nepotism, commissions, frontmen, duplications, squandering… will not be overcome because of the use of computers,” she writes.