Building E-Government at the Grassroots under Vietnam's Two-Tier Local Government Model: Current Status and Solutions from Lai Thanh Commune, Ninh Binh Province

Since 1 July 2025, Vietnam has operated a two-tier local government model in which the commune has become the main point of contact between the state and citizens for most administrative procedures. This shift places e-government at commune level at the centre of public administration reform. This paper examines the current state of e-government at the People's Committee of Lai Thanh commune, Ninh Binh province, a rural commune formed from three former communes of Kim Son district. Using a qualitative single-case design based on document analysis and descriptive statistics of official administrative data, the study situates the commune within national and provincial e-government trends and assesses it across five pillars: Institutions and leadership, digital infrastructure, data and digital identity, human resources, and citizens' digital capacity. Between 1 July and 25 December 2025, the commune's Public Administrative Service Centre received 3,166 dossiers, of which 3,161 (99.8%) were submitted online; online fee payment reached 99%, all files and results were digitised, every dossier was resolved on time, and the commune's 2025 citizen and business service index reached 94.04 points. These results exceed provincial and national targets. However, the analysis also identifies persistent constraints, including a heavier workload after decentralisation, duplicated data entry, unstable interconnection with national platforms, payment reconciliation problems and uneven digital skills among residents. The paper proposes six groups of solutions and argues that sustaining high online rates now depends less on front-office digitisation than on clean shared data, reliable back-office integration and continuous support for citizens who remain offline.