One Login, No Re-Typing, 99.5% Uptime: The New Technical Rulebook for Việt Nam's Online Public Services

When a citizen files for a business licence, a birth registration or a construction permit online in Việt Nam, the form they see on the National Public Service Portal (Cổng Dịch vụ công quốc gia) or in the VNeID app is only the front door. Behind it sits a Hệ thống thông tin giải quyết thủ tục hành chính: an administrative-procedure processing system. Officials receive, route, sign and return the file in this system. Each ministry and province has run its own, with very uneven quality. A new circular now sets one technical rulebook for all of them.

The document

Number: Thông tư 60/2026/TT-BKHCN
Issued by: the Minister of Science and Technology, Vũ Hải Quân, on the proposal of the National Digital Transformation Agency (Cục Chuyển đổi số quốc gia)
Signed: 13 October 2026
Effective: 1 December 2026
Legal basis: the Law on Digital Transformation (Luật Chuyển đổi số 148/2025/QH15); Nghị định 224/2026/NĐ-CP guiding it; Nghị định 118/2025/NĐ-CP on the one-stop-shop mechanism; Nghị định 45/2020/NĐ-CP on e-procedures; and Quyết định 29/2026/QĐ-TTg on running the National Public Service Portal
Size: 6 chapters, 21 articles and 7 appendices. Most of the substance sits in the appendices: a 41-item functional checklist, plus performance, security and “other” requirements.
Replaces: Thông tư 21/2023/TT-BTTTT (signed 31 December 2023, in force since 5 April 2024) and its 2025 amendment, Thông tư 11/2025/TT-BKHCN

It was issued two days before Thông tư 61/2026/TT-BKHCN, which rewrote the rules for government websites. The two circulars are a pair: one covers the information side of the state’s online presence, the other the transaction side.

What changes

1. From “ministry and province systems” to one centralised model. The 2023 circular was written for separate ministry-level and province-level systems. Appendix I of the new circular describes a hierarchy instead. At the top is the National Public Service Portal and its coordination system (Hệ thống điều phối giải quyết thủ tục hành chính). Under it are centralised ministry-level systems that handle each procedure nationwide, “from the centre to the locality”. A province’s own system may now process only those online services that are not yet offered on a ministry’s centralised system or the national portal. Otherwise it only mirrors data for local monitoring. Four sectors are allowed to run their own vertical systems, though they must still share status and results with the portal: Public Security, Defence, the State Bank and the Ministry of Finance (the National Single Window).

2. VNeID becomes the front door for citizens and officials. Citizens log in to the national portal through VNeID. Officials at a one-stop desk do the same: they log in to the coordination system with their VNeID account, and their role-based permissions are passed to the ministry system they are routed into. Ministry systems must also give provincial and commune officials single sign-on (SSO) across the ministry system and related sectoral software.

3. The “don’t ask twice” rule is now a technical requirement. Article 5 forbids a system to ask a person or organisation for information the state already holds or can pull from a national or sectoral database. The functional checklist puts this into practice. Interactive e-forms must offer pick-or-look-up fields for any data already in connected databases. Digitised documents must be broken out into at least nine named metadata fields, including document type, the holder’s identification number, issuing body and validity. Each citizen and business gets an electronic data store (kho quản lý dữ liệu điện tử), and a ministry or province system must reuse documents from it before querying the national store.

4. Hard numbers. Appendix IV sets page-load targets, measured on at least a 100 Mbps connection: first content in under 3 seconds, largest content in under 4 seconds, speed index under 5.8 seconds, and total blocking time under 0.6 seconds. Average response must be under 2.5 seconds per main workflow, but this does not apply to steps that wait on another agency’s database. The slowest response anywhere on a page must be under 10 seconds. Appendix VI adds 24/7 service with at least 99.5% availability in each evaluation period (planned maintenance excluded) and support for IPv6. It requires HTTPS on TLS 1.2 or higher, with TLS 1.3 recommended, and DNSSEC on the domain. It also requires a mobile-first interface and WCAG 2.2 level A accessibility.

5. Security level 3 as a minimum. Every system must be classified at least at information-system security level 3. It must also pass cybersecurity checks under Ministry of Public Security guidance and comply with personal-data-protection law in its accounts, authentication and data sharing.

6. AI enters the checklist, cautiously. Item 31 requires a virtual assistant that helps the officials who process files. Item 19 of Appendix VI allows OCR, artificial intelligence or equivalent tools to extract data from submitted files, “appropriate to the business need and deployment conditions of each system”. The second provision is permissive rather than a mandate.

7. Measured from outside, scored Pass/Fail. Systems must embed tracking code from the EMC system, the state’s digital-government monitoring platform run by the National Digital Transformation Agency. They must report any change in tracking code, configuration or connection outage within one working day. Each system is scored Pass or Fail on interface, functions, performance, security and other requirements. Each online service is graded for complexity under the national standard TCVN 14656:2026 on user-experience quality, and the grade is meant to drive cuts in paperwork. The agency inspects and ranks systems every year and publishes the results on EMC.

Who it affects

The circular applies to ministries, provincial and commune People’s Committees, industrial-zone and high-tech-park authorities, and the officials who process procedures. It also names the vendors who supply, build and operate these systems and anyone connecting other systems to them. For Vietnamese govtech companies, the appendices are effectively a procurement specification.

Practical implications

For vendors: existing systems keep running under the old 2023/2025 rules only until they are upgraded, and no later than six months after 1 December 2026, that is by early June 2027. Owners must draw up an upgrade roadmap now. Contracts and tender documents issued after 1 December should cite the new appendices.
For citizens and businesses: in principle you should type less and upload less. You should receive status updates through at least three channels (the national portal, VNeID and email), and the electronic results should land in your data store for reuse next time.
For provinces: the room to build home-grown processing software shrinks to procedures that no ministry has centralised yet.

Open questions

Will the “don’t ask twice” rule hold? Whether officials stop asking for paper depends on whether the national databases behind the checklist are complete. The rule has been in force since Nghị định 45/2020, but people are still asked for copies.
What counts as “complexity”? Grading runs under TCVN 14656:2026, and its Annex B method was not reproduced in the circular. The published grades will matter more than the circular text.
Six months is tight. Many provincial systems must both meet a longer checklist and give up part of their scope to ministry systems at the same time.

Sources

This post is general information, not legal advice.