Responsibilities of the Ministry of Treasury include, first of all, property management. The Ministry performs this task by, among other things, initiating a commercialization strategy (transforming state-owned enterprises in commercial companies) and privatization.
In 2005, the Act on exercising the right to compensation on account of leaving real estates outside the present territory of the Republic of Poland was adopted. This Act grants the right of compensation to people whose realestates remained outside the Polish territory after the World War II. The processing of applications for compensation was divided among voivods, the Minister of Treasury, and Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego. In the initial stage of the functioning of this legislation, all data concerning applications was exchanged in a paper as well as electronic form. Then, voivodeship offices and the Ministry of Treasury developed their own software facilitating the processing of applications; however, it was fragmentary and enabled automation of only small parts of the process. It was necessary to process data manually in spreadsheets and, as a consequence, the number of paid compensations was very low.
It was decided that a central system should be built for registering applications and decisions concerning payment of compensations as well as for supporting the process of validating whether calculations of compensation are correct. As a result of the tender, the winner, Asseco Poland S.A., constructed and implemented a centralized system operating in three-layer architecture, developed using Java Enterprise
Edition. The interface of the SIR solution was based on a browser started on a PC. User authorization is performed using identifiers/user names and passwords. Data is entered in the system in Voivodeship Offices via secure Internet connections. Data is validated on the level of the Ministry of Treasury and is then passed to BGK. This system provides for a simultaneous work of a hundred users.
Elements of implementation
The Central System of Registers SIR, which includes a central register and voivodeship registers, was started in the Ministry of Treasury in October 2008. The system allows for passing data of people entitled to compensation by the Ministry of Treasury to Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK) in the same month in which they were sent to the central register. The order of processing depends only on dates of sending complete and accurate data to the central register by voivodeship offices. The implementation of the system has enabled the Ministry to pass much more data to BGK and, what follows, has accelerated the pace of paying compensations considerably.
Client’s benefits
Owing to the implementation of the system, data is edited only on the level of voivodeship offices. This has made people entering and approving data in the voivodeship register responsible for its accuracy and consistency with facts. It has also forced the correctness of the passed data.
The system allows for passing data of people entitled to compensation by the Ministry of Treasury to Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego in the same month in which they were sent to the central register. During the operation of the previous system titled “Mienie Pozostawione”, 6,054 compensations of the total of PLN 224 million were paid, whereas during the operation of SIR, 23,000 compensations of the total of over PLN 1 billion have been paid (as at the middle of 2010).
The implementation of the SIR system eliminated the queues of people waiting for compensations in a few months. Efficient payment of compensations on account of leaving real estates outside the present territory of the Republic of Poland means that Poland, as the first state subject to jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, satisfied a pilot judgement (case Broniowski vs. Poland). Thus, Poland has avoided other complaints related to similar cases being submitted to the Court as well as other judgements in similar cases being passed by the Court. The Court could have awarded complainants with compensations equal to 100% value of the real properties left outside the territory of Poland.
