Estonia plots the death of bureaucracy with a digital state

(3 Jan 2019) LEAD IN
Estonia's government is launching the most ambitious project it's ever attempted. It wants to wipe out bureaucracy by making the whole government completely digital.
Everything excluding marriages, divorce and money transfers will be sorted online.

STORY-LINE:
Zero paperwork and zero bureaucracy, Estonia's 1.3 million people are about to go digital.
The aim of the small Baltic nation is to reduce bureaucracy, increase transparency and boost economic growth.
They're already on their way there.
Estonia was once part of the Soviet Union, but over the last twenty years it has transformed its society.
When the Baltic republic declared independence in 1991, the economy was so backward it had to be rebuilt from scratch.
The leadership looked for an industry where the country could compete and decided on information technology and the internet because it was a field that was as new as Estonia.
The project launched in 1997 laid the groundwork for a booming tech sector.
Skype, the video-calling service Microsoft bought for $8.5 billion in 2011, is Estonia's most famous hi-tech export.
But the impact is much broader. Information and communications accounted for 5.9 percent of the economy last year.
Now electronic authentication and digital signatures already enable paperless communications across private and public sectors.
Voting  is online and computer apps tell parents if their children and handing in their homework.
Little Oskar Lunde is about to become a citizen of this brave new world.
Across the room from the cot where he lies his parents turn on their laptop.
Andrejs Lunde and his wife Olga set down to register their new baby son.
Lunde inserts his ID card into the card reader and his wife watches as within a couple of minutes Oskar Lunde becomes Estonia's newest citizen.
"Now, after the child's name has been registered we can apply for the child benefit through the same system eesti.ee and also the family benefit, the birth benefit and also ID documents," says Olga Lunde.
For the many countries now looking to shift services online, Estonia's experiment offers a glimpse of how interacting with the state might be for future generations.
Estonia has already advanced to a largely paperless economy.
The only things you can't do electronically is marry, divorce or transfer property, and that's because the government decided it was important to turn up in person for some things.
The government aims to go further and by next spring it will begin initiating contact with citizens on key issues.
For example, if Oskar had been born a few months later, he would have been registered automatically, with his parents receiving an email to welcome him to the world.
Citizens can monitor their data and see if any government or private institution has accessed it.
"We very strongly believe in, let's say, that people need to trust the system but in order to generate trust you really have to have transparency. And that's why people have access to their own data. And that's why they can actually see if the government has used their own data," explains project manager Indrek Onnik as he sifts through his own files.
Onnik is at a demonstration showcasing the digital system.
He says: "Essentially any piece of information that the government has about the person is digital. We don't gather data on paper."
Onnik's able to look up everything and shows school grades and his graduation details. As well as his grades from a decade ago is his diving license records.
If he had a dog, its vaccination record would appear there too.

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