The energy of citizens - their desire to file signals, report irregularities and participate in improving the environment in which we live - is being wasted. This is not news to anyone. For nearly a decade, the Call Sofia system has existed in Sofia, which at first glance has a clear and good logic: you see a problem, you report a problem, the municipality fixes it. The truth, however, is that fixing the problems is almost always the most tedious part of this process.
„The angry comments of Sofia residents that their signals are a ‘voice in the wilderness’ are countless. The reason is simple – Call Sofia is supposedly a digital service, which then falls into the most analog thing in Bulgaria: the administration,“ said Boris Bonev, chairman of “Save Sofia”, at the opening of the press conference. According to him, thousands of man-hours of work can be saved with reasonable improvements both in the platform itself and in the administrative processes behind it. “Every man-hour saved is one hour less waiting for citizens who want their problems solved,“ Bonev emphasized.
In 2025, out of a total of 123 thousand signals submitted through call.sofia.bg, only 25% were processed and closed, and about 50% only received a notification that the signal was received. The average “life“ of a signal is about 200 days. “This notification is simply a confirmation that the signal has been received, and in many cases this is the end of the communication“, explained Gergin Borisov, a member of the Sofia Municipal Council's digitalization committee. He stressed that the number of processed signals is twice as high as during the GERB government period, but despite this positive trend, the result remains drastically below acceptable.
According to Borisov, the system has the potential to work significantly better, but this cannot be done with cosmetic changes on a non-working basis. Nikola Kaludov, team leader of “Digitalization“ of Spasi Sofia, emphasized that without serious optimization of processes and automation, Call Sofia will continue to burden the administration and disappoint citizens.
Borisov announced that Spasi Sofia experts have developed five specific proposals aimed at smooth optimization of the citizen signal system:
introducing two-way communication even before submitting the signal - a chatbot on call.sofia.bg, which will help with addressing the signal, and if necessary - connect the citizen with an employee of the Contact Center, as well as subscribing to responses when the signal is processed;
automated distribution of signals - once submitted, the signal will reach the responsible employee in the administration or the responsible institution directly, instead of traveling through the internal mail for weeks;
aggregation of signals - the system will recognize whether a signal concerns an already reported problem and raise the priority. If more people report the same thing, it means it is a problem affecting more citizens and needs more attention;
one phone for everything - instead of many different phones, the phone 0700 17 310 should become a single phone for all institutions - the administration, the Sofia Inspectorate, utility companies, transport operators and the emergency service;
sanctions for paper responses - the mayor should impose an administrative sanction on employees who continue to respond on paper to digitally submitted signals.
“These are reforms that should have started years ago and whether they will be recognized will be a demonstration of how much the promises of transparency and accountability are a real priority for the mayor”, said Borisov and added that these reforms are not within the competence of the Municipal Council. “There can be no excuses with the council here. That is why I hope that the Deputy Mayor for Digitalization Ivan Goychev will be allowed to work on these changes”, Borisov pointed out.
"Save Sofia" also emphasizes that from the beginning of 2026, the state obliges all administrations to switch to fully electronic document management, and Sofia Municipality still works with processes that include printing, signing, scanning and attaching PDFs. “In order not to digitize the same cumbersome processes, but to optimize and automate them, Sofia Municipality needs a completely new document management“, the expert opinion says. “The mayor comes from the IT sector and these are the systems he should be familiar with. Our expectation is to see political will for real change, not maintaining outdated software solutions that hinder the work of the administration and waste citizens' time“, Borisov concluded.