India and Estonia

 Marginal Revolution notes a twitter thread about progress in India, one man's experience with no indication of whether it applies across the very complicated country. 

1a. India is beyond advanced now as a cashless society! From street vendors to shops in the mall, everyone, everywhere is using Google Pay (or something similar).

A sugarcane juice vendor on the Dandi beach gave me a look when the QR code scan failed as I didn't have it set up!

— Dr. Karan Jani (@AstroKPJ) March 9, 2022

He doesn't describe a cause, but I assume the BJP/PM Modi would claim credit.  I'd be curious as to how Estonia compares, being a country which plunged into the e-world years before Modi became PM. 

From Estonia's Leader

I like to think I'm reasonably liberal and reasonably current with most trends, except for popular culture.  But I did a double-take when I saw the photo with this post of Estonia's leader.

So young and so blonde.

Estonia and Aautomation

 I like Estonia because of its whole-hearted adopting of e-government, which apparently carries over to other aspects of life.  However it's not all peaches and cream--the embedded tweet links to a gif of the robots:

https://twitter.com/xgebi/status/1466802322600775686?s=20

The morning in the Estonian capital began with a traffic jam of... robot couriers! Because of the snowfall, they stalled and could not move. Innovation doesn't seem to work in winter... pic.twitter.com/z6KHaWRGSK

— Deleuze (@Kukicat7) December 2, 2021

The Logistics of Checks to Everyone

As a bureaucrat when I see proposals to send checks to "everyone" I immediately jump to the logistics.

I know we've done this in the past--I think in the GWBush administration.  Google that and I find this:

In 2009, the Economic Stimulus Act sent out $14.2 billion in stimulus checks.1 2 The one-time payment went to recipients of Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, veterans, and railroad retirees.

Note that's far from "everyone".  Others, the employed, got a tax credit. This was part of Obama's stimulus.  As for GWB:

The year before ARRA, the George W. Bush administration sent out stimulus checks to battle the 2008 recession. It spent $120 billion in fiscal years 2008 and 2009.1 It rebated taxes on the first $6,000 of income for individuals or the first $12,000 of income for couples. Stimulus checks were mailed out as follows:

Individual taxpayers received up to $600.4

Married couples were eligible for up to $1,200.
Households with children received $300 per dependent child.
Rebates were reduced for higher incomes at $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 for couples.\

Around 20 million retirees on Social Security and disabled veterans also received checks for $300 if they earned at least $3,000 in benefits in 2007.4 Couples received $600.

Everything from this site including a discussion of impacts.

The problems with "everyone" is the government doesn't have a database with everyone in it, unlike say Estonia or India.  So to issue checks Congress has to cobble together databases from across the government.

Our Decentralized Systems

John Phipps twitted about this piece, specifically this:

This industry, and in particular the few groups who control the narrative, need to actually just agree and make one darn file type used to transfer and create data.I know this has and is being tried and there are a plethora of ways to go about it. Also, there are legacy systems and what not. We are not going to progress much more unless this finally gets solved though. Let us “you know what” or get off the pot.

I commented, comparing this problem with the problem of incompatible data sets in the healthcare industry.  I think this is a general feature of American society and economy: with a federal system, the size of the country and its population, the market economy, and our history we don't have centralized systems comparable to those in France or in Estonia

The Tradeoffs: Estonia

I've blogged several times about the advantages of the Estonian e-government.  I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the downsides.  Estonia may well have great security, but India, which has its own similar innovative e-government initiative going, has run into problems with its Aadhaar database, according to this report from Marginal Revolution.

The bottom line is that by using a centralized data system you increase the incentives for hackers to try to access it and the potential damage from such access. 

There's no free lunch.

My Favorite Country

New Yorker has a piece on it.

It was during Kotka’s tenure that the e-Estonian goal reached its fruition. Today, citizens can vote from their laptops and challenge parking tickets from home. They do so through the “once only” policy, which dictates that no single piece of information should be entered twice. Instead of having to “prepare” a loan application, applicants have their data—income, debt, savings—pulled from elsewhere in the system. There’s nothing to fill out in doctors’ waiting rooms, because physicians can access their patients’ medical histories. Estonia’s system is keyed to a chip-I.D. card that reduces typically onerous, integrative processes—such as doing taxes—to quick work. “If a couple in love would like to marry, they still have to visit the government location and express their will,” Andrus Kaarelson, a director at the Estonian Information Systems Authority, says. But, apart from transfers of physical property, such as buying a house, all bureaucratic processes can be done online.

Voter Fraud Commission

Trump's commission on voter fraud has requested data from all the states on voters names, addresses, ID's, registration, and voting records.  It's getting a lot of flak from the left and resistance from states both on the right (i.e. Mississippi) and left.

I'm a little conflicted on this, because I've a residual affection for the idea of a national identity, like Estonia, as an enabler for many good things.  I don't trust Mr. Kobach or Hans von Spakowsky.  In an ideal world there could be tradeoffs: do a national matching process to determine which voters are registered in more than one state and/or voted in more than one state while at the same time improving the national registry of firearms owners and those ineligible to own firearms.

That's a dream world though. As I posted recently, we have some security through chaos. Maybe one thing which could be done is to require states to do is bounce their voter registration lists against the SSA list of deceased voters (the same process as is done to avoid erroneous federal payments)>

Unique Identity: the American Solution

Some countries, like Estonia and Burkina Faso, try to assign a unique identifier to each citizen.

Others, like the U.S., don't.  Instead we have workarounds.  One of the latest which has comet to my attention is the Food and Nutrition Service's "Electronic Disqualified Recipient System (eDRS).  This seems to be a file of people who have been disqualified for food stamps (aka SNAP) because of fraud.  FNS is now notifying the public it will furnish the file to each of the states so they can verify SNAP recipients against the file.

One might consider this to be somewhat similar to the "do not fly" list, where civil liberties people protest the lack of procedures for challenging the contents.  But it seems likely from this bit in the MD manual that there is a process for determining fraud:

Fraud overpayments. Consider cases suspected of fraud to be client error overpayments until the court or an Administrative Disqualification Hearing (ADH) makes a determination of fraud. Consider an overpayment in any month in which a client files a false report timely and this results in an overpayment to be a client error overpayment. This applies even if there is an agency error in the same month, unless the agency caused the client's failure to report.

E-Residents in Estonia

I've blogged before about the great Estonia digital infrastructure supporting government.  Now they're trying to take advantage by offering e-residency to businesses.  See this Technology Review article.

The Brits Do It Better

Wonky bureaucrats often admire Britain and its Civil Service, even to the extent of trying to reform our bureaucracy along its lines.  (See Jimmy Carter's civil service reforms, which created the Senior Executive Service with the dream, so far unrealized after 40+ years, of having the best people identified and moving from agency to agency and department to department as the need arose. In other words, Jimmy wanted to duplicate the Dwight Inks of the world.)

We bureaucrats and pundits forget the differences in the societies of the two nations, and the structural differences of our governments.  Nonetheless, when I see this report from FCW, I can't resist being envious.

"British citizens can access tax, pension and drivers licensing information through a single, secure login called GOV.UK Verify. The system is set to exit a public beta and go live the week of May 23."

The UK hasn't progressed as far as Estonia, but they're way ahead of the US.  

Estonia Revisited

"Today, Estonia is regarded as one of the most advanced e-governments in the world. The use of technology and digital services is widespread in both the public and private sector. We can set up a new company and have it legally up and running within 20 minutes. Nearly 95 percent of Estonians declare their income online, because it takes less than five minutes and no accountants. All this brings tax administration costs down to only 0.3 percent of net tax revenues, and saves each citizen an average of 5.4 workdays a year."

From a World Bank post on  how Estonia got there.

Shared Services and Government as a Platform

GovExec has a piece on this subject by an IBM type.

By the nature of our government (weak executive, decentralized, federal system) we're fated to build such systems incrementally and from the ground up.  For example, the National Finance Center in New Orleans is one of the providers of shared services. Back in the day (i.e., 1968 when I joined ASCS) the agency had several ADP (automated data processing, for you whippersnappers) centers. I assume they were initial steps in the process of using computers to support operations.  Over time, ASCS closed some centers and consolidated in New Orleans and Kansas City.  Over the same time, other USDA agencies were going through the same process, leading finally to USDA taking over the NODPC.  So it came to support Federal personnel salaries and benefits for the whole department, and then to provide similar services for other units of the government.

In a way the process reminds me of the way our planetary system evolved, as I understand it, by the gradual accretion of material.

Because this is a slow process I get very envious of Estonia (as I've previously blogged) which apparently was able to do a top-down implementation.  To use another metaphor, it's rather the difference between a city like Rome, with an ancient history, and a city like Reston, planned and implemented from scratch within one man's lifetime.

What I'd Like: Move to Estonia

Via Marginal Revolution, this report on e-government in Estonia.  Through one user identity:

Today’s Estonian citizen can (though he or she does not have to):

• Identify themselves, via e-ID, an electronic identity system
• Vote (iVote, available since 2007)
• Complete tax returns (and make payments or receive refunds)
• Obtain and fulfil prescriptions (eHealth)
• Participate in census completion
• Review accumulated pension contributions and values
• Perform banking, including making and receiving payments
• Pay and interact with utilities (like water, gas and electricity)
• Interact with the education system (e-Education)
• Set up businesses
• Sign contracts
• And more.

Compare that with our government, where we're still struggling with USDA agencies providing such service.

5 Minutes to Pay Your Taxes?

That was the claim in a newspaper article this week.  Trying a short-cut search brought up this article in The Economist, which has a more reasonable estimate:

Estonia’s approach makes life efficient: taxes take less than an hour to file, and refunds are paid within 48 hours. By law, the state may not ask for any piece of information more than once, people have the right to know what data are held on them and all government databases must be compatible, a system known as the X-road. In all, the Estonian state offers 600 e-services to its citizens and 2,400 to businesses.

 As a bureaucrat I love the idea.  The reality for the US though is we're always going to trade efficiency for what we see as privacy and freedom.