The Digital Economy and Society (DES) Ministry is planning to amend regulations in order to enforce liability for banks and telecom operators if they are found to be negligent in tackling online scams, says DES permanent secretary Wisit Wisitsora-At.
He said e-government, digital manpower and digital trust are three priorities driving digital transformation.
Mr Wisit was speaking yesterday at the "60 years of Excellence: Creating Great Leaders, Designing the Future" seminar, hosted by the Thailand Management Association (TMA).
In the area of digital trust, the ministry plans to add more rules to last year's measures for the prevention and suppression of technological crimes, enforcing liability among related service providers, particularly for mule bank accounts and SIM cards. These efforts are part of the DES Ministry's continued efforts to suppress online scams.
The degree of enforcement would depend on the degree of a service provider's negligence related to damage caused to the victim, he said.
Online scams and online gambling are estimated to account for 45% of the country's overall GDP of 17-18 trillion baht, Mr Wisit noted.
In terms of e-government, the ministry has a budget of 200 million baht for the 2025 fiscal year to build a conceptual design for the Cloud First policy for government services, particularly for the transformation of the state agencies' back-end systems to support paperless work.
Their cloud adoption would enable more data usage for data analytics and artificial intelligence, Mr Wisit noted.
The ministry is now paperless to show that it can be achieved, he said. This includes the receipt of numerous daily requests to eradicate URLs claimed to be illegal, said Mr Wisit.
It has been estimated that within 2024, at least 50% of government services will be conducted on a paperless basis. This will involve the Commerce Ministry, Interior Ministry, Culture Ministry and Prime Minister's Office.
State agencies can become paperless if they move their back-end systems to the cloud and use software provided to them on a software-as-a-service basis. Government websites can be moved to the cloud in order to make them more secure, said Mr Wisit.
When it comes to the front end, the ministry anticipates that there will be 1,000 e-services ready to work with the digital ID system.
The ministry also deploys a robotic system to investigate websites suspected of carrying out illegal activities and submit their names to the internet service providers. It also uses the robotic system to follow up and see whether or not the websites were actually subsequently blocked.
In terms of digital manpower, the ministry will roll out the "learn to earn" platform to match the demand for workers with the available supply of skilled labour to address shortages.
The platform will be be integrated with data from educational institutions, business communities and the Labour Ministry. This will serve the needs of the labour market.
Mr Wisit said the ministry aims to increase Thailand's global digital competitiveness ranking to 30 by 2027 from 35 last year by improving the country's knowledge and future readiness factors.
The ministry assigned the National Statistical Office to collect digital data from various state agencies countrywide to get an overview of the country's status in various parameters to improve the ranking.