In a project that will hopefully take Malta to the top place in the European rankings in e-Government, all Government services will be made accessible online by the year 2010. Malta is currently ranked second within the whole EU for the range and quality of online e-services offered by the government.

The Minister for Investment, Industry and IT, Austin Gatt, announced the new ambitious project whilst inaugurating additional e-Government services which will allow the online provision of notifications of deaths and the searching of wills.

Around 3,000 deaths are registered in Malta and Gozo each year and the new system will make it much easier to notify the government of a death or search for details of a will. The new electronic systems will speed up the procedure and make it much more time efficient.

The Minister also announced that the Government would be seeking to form an alliance with Maltese software suppliers with a view to speed up the pace at which the Government launches it's online services.

Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg added that Malta is at the forefront when it comes to e-Government, and that the Government wanted to keep strengthening the services in order to facilitate the life of citizens and to reduce the need for them to have to run between one Government department and another.

He said that the Ministry for Justice and Home Affairs was amongst those Ministries that offered the most online services, including birth and death certificates and passports.

Full details of online government services, in both English and Maltese, is available here.