As Lao Dong Newspaper reported, Ho Chi Minh City is seeking opinions on the draft Resolution of the City People's Council stipulating the mechanism for socializing professional and nghiệp vụ activities to support the resolution of administrative procedures. This is to reduce pressure on the public apparatus.
Currently, Ho Chi Minh City is carrying out 2,170 administrative procedures, including 1,755 provincial-level procedures, 374 commune-level procedures and 57 procedures under the authority of other agencies.
In just the first 5 months of 2026, the city's administrative agencies have received and processed more than 1.78 million dossiers, focusing on fields such as land, construction, investment, business registration and civil status.
To meet the large workload, Ho Chi Minh City currently has more than 11,600 civil servants and public employees directly participating in receiving and resolving administrative procedures at departments, branches and People's Committees of communes, wards, and special zones.
However, according to the city's survey, each commune-level civil servant currently has to undertake 4-9 groups of tasks, with many complex processing procedures. Therefore, although the participating force is quite large, the average number of dossiers per person is still very high.
Work pressure causes many dossier receiving points to be frequently overloaded, especially during peak periods or when legal policies change. People and businesses sometimes have to wait a long time to complete procedures.
Notably, the survey shows that 56% of civil servants and public employees participating in resolving administrative procedures have to work overtime - equivalent to nearly 6,500 civil servants and public employees who regularly have to work overtime.
On average, each person works an extra 30-40 hours/month, including working in the evening, Saturday and Sunday. In some agencies and units, the rate of civil servants working overtime is up to more than 90%, with overtime hours over 100 hours/month.
According to the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee, prolonged overload makes civil servants have little time for in-depth research, posing a risk of errors or prolonging the processing time of dossiers. In the first 5 months of 2026, the city recorded 11,261 dossiers resolved late.
Work pressure also caused many commune-level officials and civil servants to resign, including the head of the unit.
In order to reduce pressure on the administrative apparatus, Ho Chi Minh City is promoting digital transformation in resolving administrative procedures. The city has exploited data from the National Public Service Portal, the VNeID electronic identification application; integrated 30/45 databases into the common data warehouse, announced 70/91 open data sets, and standardized more than 31,000 location identification data.
The city is implementing an investment project of 1,265 billion VND to upgrade the information technology infrastructure for the Public Administration Service Centers at all levels.
From the end of 2024, Ho Chi Minh City is researching the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in receiving and identifying dossiers and automating some stages to shorten processing time.
However, many stages such as digitizing documents, extracting data, and checking the validity of dossiers still have to be carried out manually, taking up a lot of time for civil servants.
Faced with this reality, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Committee proposed to socialize some support stages in the process of resolving administrative procedures such as guidance on declaration, receipt, classification of dossiers, digitization and electronic data inspection.
According to the proposal, organizations and businesses can participate in performing these tasks under the supervision of state agencies, while the appraisal, decision and approval of dossiers are still under the authority of public authorities.
This mechanism is expected to be prioritized for areas with large dossiers such as land, construction, investment, business registration and civil status.
Ho Chi Minh City expects this solution to help reduce millions of manual labor hours each year, reduce overtime pressure for civil servants, and improve the quality of service for people and businesses.
