Six years after the law authorizing the use of the digital signature to validate documents of the national public administration, the tool is still not applied, mainly, due to the delays in the construction of the necessary technological infrastructure. According to a report by the National Audit Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish) this "lack of efficiency delays the improvement of state services to citizens".

The digital signature is a technological instrument that allows guaranteeing the authorship of digital documents, matching their characteristics with those of paper.

In 2002, Law 25,506 was approved, which regulated the use of the digital signature and, in addition, established a period of five years to complete a process of "destabilization" of the State. That is to say that the project had to function fully since last year. The idea was based on the elimination of paper using this technology, reduce the cost of storage space, the use of photocopies and speed up communications.

Each user of the system has two keys, one public and the other private. "Digital certificates", meanwhile, are documents that "attest to the link between a public key and an individual or entity," explains the AGN. Finally, to recognize that a document was digitally signed, it is necessary that the digital certificate of the signatory has been issued by a "licensed certifier".

The control body says that this last link in the chain is the one that delays the implementation of the project: "The digital signature has no implementation, in the State or in private activity, due to the lack of licensed certifiers." This failure, in turn, originates from "PKI" provided by the Act, which is the set of hardware, software, communication channels, and procedures necessary to provide Certification.

On the other hand, the budget of the Undersecretaries of Public Administration, in charge of applying the norm, "does not discriminate the expenses assigned to the Digital Government", which means that it is not known how much money is destined to the development of the digital signature. This activity, which expands the AGN, has external financing through a loan that only serves to provide technical assistance, but does not pay the costs of maintenance or infrastructure.

The depaperization of the State should be done according to what each of the Powers set. The Audit states that "in the case of the Executive, there was no knowledge of a specific plan to comply with this process", nor were there mass training courses via web for decision makers, who are the potential users. Likewise, no procedures were also detected to measure the growth of the system: "The progress is made to the priority that each administration assigns to the depaperization," says the report and adds that, without coordination, the digital signature progresses with "slow, and it is not possible to predict how much the implementation will require.”

Inside the Undersecretariat, the AGN detected that the digital signature activity has no formal responsible in its technical or organizational levels and also considered as "critical" the small number of people who dominate the technologies demanded by the project: Technical support would be at risk because the labor market offers better conditions than those for contracted personnel, "the report said.

There is another tool of this type in the country: electronic signature. The difference lies in the probative value of documents that each has. The digital has a presumption "iuris tantum", that is to say that when a digitally signed document is verified as correct, it is presumed that it comes from the subscriber. While if an electronic signature is unknown by its alleged owner, whoever receives that document must prove its validity.

The Audit comments that although the electronic signature has been available to the public sector since 1998, "only an advance of less than 5% was achieved."