MIU will completely digitize services for seafarers, – Kubrakov

The Minister of Infrastructure, Olexandr Kubrakov, said that the Ministry of Infrastructure plans to completely digitize the seafarers’ certification field.

He explained on his Facebook page, the reasons for such a decision, and also listed the digital projects for seafarers launched last year.

Thus, last summer, the security service specialists exposed a scheme for the design of permits of Ukrainian seafarers. According to experts, she annually brought it to the organizers to $150 million.

With the participation of officials of the state service and river transport (Maritime Administration) and the Inspection for Training and Certification of Seafarers (ITCS), the conditions in which they had to pay money to intermediaries to get documents or positive test result were created. Depending on the post, the seafarers were demanded from $3 thousand to $8 thousand.

According to the SSU (Security Service of Ukraine) estimates, the State Register of Seafarers finally got into the hands of individuals back at the end of 2019 – early 2020. It was a huge structured database, which was being gathered for years. It is clear that one of the main tasks of the state was to prevent the destruction of this data.

In August last year, the SSU finally found a DATA center, where servers with the registry were placed. However, the data (and we are talking about the terabytes of information) were in the most disorganized state. The registry was managed to return the state, but it was actually impossible to work with such data.

Therefore, Ministry of Infrastructure together with the Ministry of Media and the USAID/UK aid project “Transparency and accountability in public administration and services/TAPAS” began the process of restoring the registry and creating a new information product. Last week, they announced a tender for the development of the first stage of the module of certification of seafarers, as well as government electronic services for seafarers on the portal “Diia”.

From November last year, the functioning of key information systems based on the ITCS has resumed. We are talking about temporary measures, because “it is impossible to make efficient tools that were developed for 5 years under corruption interests.”

Therefore, MIU decided to completely rebuild and digitize the seafarers’ diploma science.

The Minister listed the latest innovations in this area: extension due to a pandemic of the validity period of previously issued sailors before July of this year; Experimental project to test seafarers based on the International Crew Evaluation System 6.0 system (CES).

The first CES testing was carried out last November. MIU counted 126 exams, 77 of which were commissioned successfully. In the future, the ministry plans to completely translate the testing of seafarers into this system. But for this, everyone should be ready to take exams in English, as the product owner requires.

In June last year, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament of Ukraine) adopted the draft law No. 3944 – he canceled the obligatory periodic certification of seafarers in the case of continuous experience in the courts. For this norm, 120 seafarers have already received the minutes of state qualifications commissions, in the near future relevant evidence will be issued. Even about 200 similar applications will be processed til the end of January, Kubrakov stated.