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Government Procurement

Cashless taxi rides for the SG government

By Xinghui Guo | 31 March 2011

The Singapore government’s shared services centre, Vital.org, has procured a 4 year taxi charge service for 16 government agencies, saving an approximate S$400,000 (US$ 317,157) over the entire contract period.

Vital.org—the government’s one-stop shop for back office functions including payroll, travel and leave management—has signed a Taxi Corporate Charge Programme that allows civil servants to hope on a cab and make payment by a corporate Cabcharge card, or a taxi e-voucher. Both the card’s and e-voucher’s credit limit can be set by the government agency based on travel guidelines.

Apart from the cost savings, this move means that the Singapore government can now “leverage on technology to increase transparency” from the CabCharge Programme’s online customer portal that captures the travel pattern of official taxi trips, allowing greater accountability and control over taxi expenditure.

Dylah Harharah, Vital.org’s Head Travel Management, said: “From the CabCharge backend, we can retrieve travel pattern of official taxi trips. The portal captures detailed transaction information based on card records including tracking of taxi expenditure, carrying out exception checks, and performing trend analysis.”

While the taxi programme currently has 16 agencies on board, Vital.org aims to eventually attract a total of 40 agencies to join the scheme, thereby achieving a “whole-of-government demand aggregation effort to obtain competitive contracted rates on the administration fee charged by a cab company on a pool of common users”.

Clarence Ti (pictured), Chief Executive of Vital.org, said to FutureGov Asia Pacific: “This is an opportunity for Vital.org to demand aggregate and achieve economies-of-scale for participating public agencies from the lower administrative fees.”

CabCharge cards can also be used in the United Kingdom and Australia, bringing this cashless benefit to travelling civil servants too.

Last year, Vital.org helped the government save S$9.5 mil (US$7.5 mil) through cheaper air fares, hotel stays and travel insurance.

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