From last month, for example, all Danish residents have had to nominate a single bank account as their "Easy Account" to receive payments from the state. All public agencies have access to details of these accounts. The idea is to abolish the use of cheques, as well as the need to collect account details every time someone claims a benefit or carries out some other transaction with government.
Companies weren't the only ones grumbling - the finance ministry used the change to enforce budget cuts in local government. It calculated how much councils should be able to save from e-invoicing over the year and cut their budgets by one third of that sum in advance, forcing them to find savings. "They didn't love us," says Claus Juhl, managing director of the finance ministry's agency for governmental management, which masterminded the policy. "But if you want efficiency in the public sector you have to use rougher tools."
The agency has other services in its sights. It is phasing out paper payslips for Denmark's 130,000 central government employees; instead, staff receive an electronic notification in their "eBoks" a secure online repository.
Meanwhile, officials at the country's Digital Task Force are drawing up a new e-government strategy, which is likely to set targets for the abolition of more paper transactions, with businesses at least, over the coming years.
Denmark has been putting the building blocks of e-government in place for years - decades, if you include the national citizens' register set up in 1969. There's still a long way to go to get critical mass with such things as digital signatures, essential if people are to use the eBoks service. Some aspects of the programme, such as the national web portal, are well behind the UK.
However, Denmark's programme has many admirers abroad. The e-invoicing project picked up an EU award for innovation at the recent ministerial e-government project in Manchester, not for anything technically clever but for the resolution with which it was made compulsory. British ministers are impressed by the direct link with efficiency savings - something that has so far eluded most British e-projects.
Until now the idea of imposing electronic government has been taboo in Britain. A couple of years ago I had an angry call from the (then) Office of the e-Envoy denying that any such thing was under consideration. The wind now seems to be changing. The latest e-government strategy, published last November, says euphemistically that government "should steer citizens and businesses to the lowest cost channels" and that "at an appropriate time, legacy channels should be closed". A first step will be an ad campaign to persuade people to "lose the queues".
Compulsion won't be universally popular. One focus of opposition is likely to be the small post office, already threatened by the ending of cash benefits payments. Another danger is that ordering people to transact electronically will generate resistance. The Adam Smith Institute, in a punchy new report called Rewiring Democracy, describes compulsion as "the worst option available. If citizens already distrust government, forcing them to go online is going to do little to redress this problem."
Finally, of course, before e-government services can be made compulsory, they have to be 100% reliable. Judging by the non-arrival of my European health insurance card, ordered online before Christmas, we're not yet there.
Despite these worries, if ministers are serious about cutting costs, the lure of mandatory e-government will be hard to resist. Watch out for horned helmets on the hat stands of Whitehall.
Autor: Michael Cross
Quelle: The Guardian, 26.01.2006
