An acquaintance has requested aid from the digital kit offered by the Government within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. He told me his experience: «This summer I received a series of advertisements from my usual IT provider saying that with the digital kit I could have up to 1,000 euros to renew my equipment. I was interested, so I followed the link that I received in the mail. I had to fill out a form and a few hours later I received a call from the employee of a Digitizing Agent.
[Los Agentes Digitalizadores (AD) son empresas tecnológicas que colaboran con el Gobierno en la implantación del kit digital. Hay 11.400 agentes adheridos en toda España y el 98% de ellos son autónomos o pymes].
«With his call I discovered that the true beneficiary of the digital kit is the Digitizing Agent because he is in charge of implementing the technological solutions, some of which are very basic and that I already had. The AD keeps the digital bonus, which is generally two-thirds of the aid. The incentive is clear, the more kits you place, the more money you will earn. There are several critical aspects, as explained to you. First, it’s easier to order the kit as a freelancer. If you do it as a company, the paperwork multiplies and communication with the Administration becomes more complex. If you do it as a company, you are classified based on the number of employees. As a self-employed person or as a company with less than three employees, you can aspire to aid of 3,000 euros. “Up to 10 workers it is 6,000 euros and up to 50, 12,000 euros.”
[Hasta la fecha se han concedido alrededor 490.000 ayudas, lo que equivale a más de 2.000 millones de euros procedentes de los fondos europeos Next Generation EU. El Presupuesto total del Kit digital es de 3.000 millones].
He continues with his story: «You immediately realize that the key to the process is finding the right technological solution that exceeds the State’s requirements. And these are very low. Acceptable activities are ‘creation of websites and basic internet presence; electronic commerce; social media management; customer management; ‘business intelligence’ and analytics; process management; electronic invoice; virtual office tools and services; secure communications and cybersecurity; advanced presence on the internet and marketplace. All this sounds bombastic and complex, but after discarding many of them because I already had them, the digitizing agent considered that the best thing to do was to rework the website that I myself made a decade ago with WordPress… And the solution he offered me was ‘a page Improved WordPress-type website.
He tells me that this has already caused him great disappointment. «But the advisor knew more than I about the behavior and incentives existing in the Administration. ‘At first they were very strict, but as they need to justify the expenditure of these funds they have been opening their hands and relaxing,’ he explained to me. The Digitizing Agent submitted the application for me as a freelancer, to avoid paperwork, and within fifteen days! They awarded me a digital kit worth 3,000 euros, 2,000 corresponding to the digital bonus and the rest to the so-called kit extension. Then the surprises begin: the Digitizing Agent takes all the digital bonus and you have three months to carry out the work (make a WordPress-type page that took me less than a day and that I maintain daily), but the self-employed person must pay the VAT (420 euros) of the operation. At the same time, you are entitled to an additional 1,000 euros to invest in computer equipment that, after a year, you can keep or return. The supplier associated with the Digitizing Agent (the one who sent me the advertisement that gave rise to all this) sends you a catalog of the available material and then you discover that it is basic equipment, generally old and even discontinued and that if you want access to better hardware and of the latest generation you have to add between 1,000 and 2,000 euros from your pocket.
“The Government is more interested in increasing statistics than in spending resources well”
He continues his story: «But what really put me off was the website. It was not a true technological improvement nor was it going to change my digital presence as a freelancer, it seemed surprising to me that the Administration accepted that proposal so easily. It was clear that those in the Ministry were more interested in fattening their statistics than in efficiently allocating public resources. A tax deduction would have been more helpful to me as a self-employed person than the digital kit, which is actually a stimulus for the Digitizing Agents. What I don’t know is if they will become more competitive by creating more websites and installing antivirus. There will undoubtedly be SMEs that will benefit from certain digital services, but statistics indicate that half of the beneficiaries have only created web pages that did not seem essential to them before the kit. I felt complicit in the waste of a Keynesian fiscal policy aimed at digging holes and covering them again, so I decided to give up. The Digitizing Agent was surprised by my decision and warned me that I would have to pay compensation of 250 euros for the time spent on paperwork. I told him that I understood and that I would pay for it without question, but that I would give up the waste that the digital kit represented in my case. Not in my name, I told him. And I sleep more peacefully.”
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