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Estonia is often cited as the ultimate benchmark for how citizens should engage with government, with 99 percent of services available digitally.
The population of Estonia is 1.3 million; Australia has around 25 million, the United States 326 million, and China 1.38 billion. But as Estonia’s global affairs director Sandra Särav said, any company would rather deliver services to 25 million than 1 million, so it’s not just the country’s size that has allowed a digital government.
Estonia is not a developing country, either, with IT accounting for 7 percent of its GDP and agriculture less than 1 percent. But it is a young country.
Estonia regained its independence in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Särav told the Technology in Government conference in Canberra last week that the country was showered with help from neighbours such as Finland, which offered up old computer systems and such to rebuild. Instead, the country decided to start from scratch.
Särav said Estonians trusted their newly elected government — and it’s here that the success of digitisation has its roots, she said. With government changing so frequently in Australia, even with internal party leadership spills, it is hard not to draw distinctions between that and government IT projects running less than smoothly.
“The government decided it was going to do something differently, working with the private sector in shaping the former Soviet Union country to be a digital nation,” she said. “In every country, you have people that hate their government, but we’ve trusted them with the digitisation process.”
Estonia also views legislation as an enabler, according to Särav.
Government digitisation started in the ’90s, and by the year 2000, its first digital service was served up to citizens.
Estonia first introduced e-tax declaration, offering a better way of doing taxes that the citizen was keen to adopt. And that was the idea: Introducing a better way of performing something that was burdensome, rather than digital for digital’s sake.
Currently, it takes around three minutes to take care of taxes in Estonia. The country is now moving to full automation, where companies don’t actually need to declare tax at all, as the information — such as salary payments — is automatically sent off to the government.
“The government would probably know when the company would go into bankruptcy before they did,” she said of the economic oversight such automation could provide.
In 2018, there are only three things you cannot do online with the government in Estonia: Get married, get divorced, and buy real estate.
“These three things are the high-risk transactions for every citizen,” she explained.
Since the concept was introduced in 2002, 98 percent of Estonians own an ID card, which is the key to using all the digital services and getting the most out of them. In Estonia, when a person is born, they’re assigned a personal ID code — it’s compulsory to have one.