Away with the red tape by Mette Kramer

MindLab

Away with the Red Tape A better encounter with government

Away with the Red Tape

Foreword

Three Studies

Away with the Red Tape

Foreword Incomprehensible tax returns. Frustrating online assessment systems. Bewildering letters from the authorities. These were some of the experiences that we at MindLab encountered when we interviewed a large group of young Danes about their encounter with public bureaucracy under the headline ‘Away with the Red Tape’. In this booklet you will meet some of these young people and read MindLab’s ideas for achieving citizen-friendly public services through user involvement. Eliminating bureaucracy and red tape has often focused on objective measurements and targets such as the time taken to complete a task, solve a case or the number of rules to be followed. But our approach did not prejudge whether or not a given rule or procedure should be considered burdensome. Instead, our focus was to examine people’s subjective experiences with official rules, communications and services. The stories told to us by members of the public revealed a variety of different patterns which we have summarised as four key insights. These insights can be used as inspiration and a starting point for future projects that seek to improve citizen’s experience of public services. At the end of the booklet you can read about some of the solutions that we developed together with our colleagues in a range of government departments and agencies. Each solution attempts in its own way to improve people’s experience when they are dealing with official bureaucracy. At MindLab we believe that such holistic approaches will produce the most satisfied citizens, as well as the most efficient use of public resources.

Christian Bason Director, MindLab

Away with the Red Tape

Three Studies

Away with the Red Tape

Three Studies of Young Citizens In our ‘Away with the Red Tape’ -project, MindLab studied three selected groups of citizens that are served by our parent ministries, which are the Ministry of Employment, the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, and the Ministry of Taxation (‘SKAT’). The groups studied were:

Young Business Owners Without Employees The study uncovered the challenges that eight young business owners experienced when setting up and operating their businesses. The study found that these young people were surprised by the volume and complexity of official bureaucracy. They struggled to find relevant information and had difficulties with the increasing demand for on-line interaction with the authorities.

Young Victims of Industrial Injury The study examined the experiences of seven young industrial injury victims in their relationship with the National Board of Industrial Injuries. The study found that the young people had difficulty understanding how their cases were handled and how decisions were reached. They also felt overwhelmed by all the different information and enquiries sent out by the National Board of Industrial Injuries.

Young Taxpayers The study looked at the challenges facing young people when handling their tax returns. MindLab studied nine young people’s experience with the Danish tax authority. We concluded that young people are unaware that they are personally responsible for paying the correct amount of tax, and that they have great difficulty using on-line self assessment systems. This is because the web-based solution assumes knowledge of the taxation system that young users do not possess.

Portrait of a Citizen

Young Business Owner

Portrait of a Citizen Name: William Age: 23 Residence: Shares a flat in Nørrebro with his brother and a friend. Occupation: Studying at the Danish Design School and working for his own company, Nørrebro Drys. Encounter with government: Searching for information about the tax regulations for his business.

Young Business Owner

Portrait of a Citizen

Employer Contributions and General Anxiety “After I submitted the form to set up my company, I was sent a touchy-feely little brochure which said that we business owners were the backbone of Danish society. I had not expected something like that from a government department.” In his tiny one-man business, Nørrebro Drys, William sells graphics, textile designs and DJ gigs. He thinks he is lucky to be doing what he is doing. ”The most fun stuff I do is also what I’m making money from,” he grins. He has never been particularly concerned about the need to have a business, but when he landed a contract worth of 25.000 Danish crowns, he decided it was time to start a business. However, this brought a new worry into his life. ”I feel nervous every time I get a letter from the tax authorities. I worry there’s going to be a load of numbers and that I won’t understand what they’re doing there. When I was just getting my student grant and had a part-time job, I could hardly have done anything wrong. Now I can,” he says. William thinks it is hard to understand under which circumstances government considers him a business owner and when he is considered a regular citizen. On the tax authority’s website he has to log in to both the Business and the Personal systems in order to correctly submit his tax return. ”The University of Zanzibar’s website is easier to understand than the Danish tax authority. When I need to check my annual tax return, for example, I can only do it on the ”Personal” system, and I’ve never actually understood why they’ve organized it that way.”

Portrait of a Citizen

Young Business Owner

William is also unsure about what he is allowed to deduct against his taxes. He has just completed a Design School textile project, and hopes to be able to sell one of his designs to a bed linen company, but can he claim a deduction for his expensive textile markers? ”I don’t know whether I’m supposed to sit and design directly for my customer with the markers, or whether it is supposed to be for the company in a more general sense. So I end up arguing backwards and forwards with myself before I decide what to do. It all gets to be rather contradictory,” he says. Last year, William got a letter from the tax authorities saying that he had not paid his employer contribution and therefore owed 1500 kr. This was a lot of money to William, who never understood why he owed it in the first place. ”I don’t think SKAT is setting out to cheat me, but it is impossible to work out where that number came from. And when they send you such a cold dismissive letter making the case for you to be deprived of a lot of money, you really feel powerless”. Fortunately William had help from his older brother, who discovered that William had already paid the amount in question along with his general taxes and therefore only owed 500 crowns. William has now informed the tax authorities of this, but they have not sent a response. William hopes he will soon be able to afford to have an accountant do his bookkeeping and review his tax affairs. It is too complicated for him to tackle himself.

“I have to confess that I don’t understand what the tax authority website says. That feels like a defeat to me. It makes me want to ignore the tax thing altogether.“

Away with the Red Tape

Our Insights

Away with the Red Tape

Insight # 1

Insight # 2

Young people’s interaction with the bureaucratic system is characterised by guesswork and uncertainty.

Young people struggle to apply official language to their own situations.

Young people’s first encounters with state bureaucracy often happen in an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion. The regulations are complicated. Forms are written in language that is far from being ordinary speech. It is hard to understand the role and purpose of all the different agencies. For instance, in the study of young taxpayers our informants did not understand why they had to pay a provisional tax return. Their mistakes and confusion meant that incorrect provisional calculations were repeated in the following year. In our study of young business owners, most of them were in doubt about what deductions they were allowed to offset against their taxes. They were forced to feel their way forward or to seek advice from their peers – advice that they could not always rely on. The sense of unease and lack of comprehension that accompany encounters with the bureaucratic system affects the young people’s relationship to the state authorities. It means that they may end up requiring more resources and that their cases will become more complicated to administer. Some choose to avoid the authorities where possible; some will skip those rules that still seem too complicated to take seriously: others end up contacting the authorities much more often.

A great deal of official communication uses legal jargon in order to ensure administrative accuracy. This often makes official letters and notifications difficult to read, as well as making it even harder for the recipients to relate them to their own circumstances. Many young people say they wish it was easier to deal with officials in person. They simply want someone who can translate legislative jargon into something that makes sense in terms of their own reality. For instance, many victims of industrial injury had trouble understanding that the legal remit of the National Board of Industrial Injuries only covers loss of earnings. However, for the victims, the experience of being injured went far beyond their work, deeply affecting their private lives as well. Many of the young business owners complained in a similar fashion that they found it hard to obtain an overview of which laws and regulations had any relevance to their businesses. In recent decades, more aspects of case administration have been delegated to the individual citizen. This is typically because of a desire to increase efficiency and cut back on expensive personal contact, replacing it with cheaper digital services. But this transfer of activity to end users requires a much higher awareness of the need to meet people in their everyday reality and language. How to produce satisfied citizens who are in fact able to navigate through the world of state authorities?

Portrait of a Citizen

Young Industrial Injury Victim

Portrait of a Citizen Name: Jeanett Age: 24 Residence: Lives with her partner in a house on the outskirts of Faaborg. Occupation: Trained home carer. Awarded disability pension because of chronic back pain. Encounter with government: Applying for compensation following an industrial injury.

Young Industrial Injury Victim

Portrait of a Citizen

Two White Ring Binders “Every time I get a letter from the National Board of Industrial Injuries I get a stomach ache. Are they writing to tell me I am not entitled to anything, or will I get compensation? Sometimes I’ve looked in the mailbox every day just because I was hoping to receive news from them”. Jeanett has two white ring binders bulging with letters from the National Board of Industrial Injuries. They began to arrive when the agency reopened her case three years ago. ”One day two letters came at once. They were in separate envelopes, so I assume they must be spending some money on postage over there”. Jeanett fractured her spine while she was helping a resident at the nursing home she was training in. The pain is slowly getting worse. Nowadays she spends much of her day in bed: it is simply too painful to be up. Three years after the accident, her insurance company encouraged her to ask the National Board of Industrial Injuries to reopen her case. ”I wasn’t expecting much to come of it because I had heard that the National Board of Industrial Injuries wasn’t easy to deal with. At the time I was simply hoping the pain would go away”. When Jeanett succeeded in having her case reopened, she spent a long time reading all the letters she received. Her mother works as an accountant and helped her to read the letters, because Jeanett found them filled with difficult words.

Portrait of a Citizen

Young Industrial Injury Victim

”My mother took charge of a great deal of it because I don’t have much energy to spare. All those different people who had something to say about my case, and then the National Board of Industrial Injuries sent me their statements”. Jeanett eventually stopped reading the letters thoroughly. Out of the total of 25 letters that she received only four required an answer. The most important one was a questionnaire in which she was supposed to explain how the accident had occurred and how it had affected her work life. This annoyed Jeanett, because she felt that her accident had serious consequences for her whole life. The pain has affected everything from her relationships with her friends to her ability to wear heels. Jeanett ended by hand writing a letter to the National Board of Industrial Injuries in which she pointed out the consequences of the pain for all aspects of her daily life. In the past eight months Jeanett has received no correspondence from the National Board of Industrial Injuries, and that makes her uneasy. ”They have all the doctors’ statements and all the insurance papers, so why haven’t I had my final decision? I would be happy with a letter explaining how far along they are in the administration process plus an explanation of why they can’t make a decision on the matter yet,” says Jeanett, who is hoping for a compensation amount that will be big enough to allow her to have some alterations made to her house that will make it easier to keep clean. She has tried calling the National Board of Industrial Injuries and asking why she had not heard anything. That led nowhere. ”The lady just said that my call had been noted, and that she would look into it, I mean why it was taking so long. And I haven’t heard anything since”. However, Jeanett is determined to keep calling once in a while, just to be sure that her case is still current.

“I do not know who the people in the National Board of Industrial Injuries are, nor have they ever met me, and yet they are still going to make this important decision. The fact that I’ve never met them makes me nervous.”

Away with the Red Tape

Our Insights

Away with the Red Tape

Insight # 3

Insight # 4

Young people with a vocational training find it much harder to navigate their way through official agencies than young people with a higher level of education.

The shift towards digitalization can increase citizens’ perception of red tape.

It makes a difference whether you are a home carer or a university student when you have to navigate through the world of officialdom. A great deal of difference, in fact. Having a higher education makes it easier to understand forms and regulations, and it can increase your satisfaction with the system or make it easier to obtain a decision in your favour. In our study of young industrial injury victims, it is clear that young people with a further education had a better understanding of what was happening with their case and with their decision, and were therefore more satisfied and confident regarding the National Board of Industrial Injuries. Although the Danish population’s level of education is higher than ever, around half of an annual cohort of young people have only received vocational training or less. To serve them in such a way that they feel they are being understood and treated decently is a major task for the state administration.

Young people are on Facebook, and Twitter. They’ve had a mouse in their hands since they were tiny, and all the shortcut keys have been burned into their spinal cords. This also means that they are more adept consumers of digital services than older citizens, and quicker to reject websites that seem slow or difficult to use. Perhaps this is why young people are highly critical of many digital services established by government. They are surprised by the fact that the solutions are not better targeted towards them and they get stuck when the language gets too complex. For example, in our study of the young taxpayers it became apparent that tax authorities’ online assessment service was not only difficult to navigate, but also required a large vocabulary of tax-related jargon that young people rarely possessed. In recent decades public digitization projects have focussed on whether the population possessed the necessary IT skills. But it is not enough to be able to use a mouse to be digitally self-reliant as a citizen. You also need to be able to understand and use the information and concepts that the official websites are using.

Portrait of a Citizen

Young Taxpayer

Portrait of a Citizen Name: Dennis Age: 21 Occupation: Undertaking school apprenticeship as a car mechanic. Residence: Lives with his girlfriend in an apartment outside Nykøbing Falster. Encounter with government: Needed to change his preliminary tax assessment because of changes to his income.

Young Taxpayer

Portrait of a Citizen

The Ladies at The Citizens Service Office “I feel much more comfortable going down to the Citizens Service Office when I have a question about my taxes or need to change my deductions. They know what they’re doing, which is more than I do when it comes to tax.” Dennis likes to be in charge of his finances. He has put a budget together, he has subscribed to an electronic payment processor, and he almost never has an overdraft, even though it can be tricky to stretch his money as far as it needs to go. He has just moved in with his girlfriend Thilde, who is studying at a vocational college. Together, they have 2000 danish crowns left over every month for food, petrol and entertainment after fixed expenses. Dennis has a file for his tax affairs and also checks his annual tax certificate on the Web. His dad has taught him to go down to The Citizens Service Office every time he gets a new job if he wants to avoid being liable for underpaid tax. The staff at The Citizens Service Office make sure that the tax office is informed if his new job will affect his deductions or taxation rate. Dennis asks them to state his income as being slightly higher than he anticipates, so he can be sure of getting some money back. ”It’s a great feeling to get a smidgen back, but I’ve heard that the Inland Revenue has begun to adjust it on the fly so that you’ll end up at 0. Last year I got 9000 crowns back. This year I only got 1000 crowns. It’s a bit of a bummer”. The Citizens Service Office lies a little way from Dennis’ apartment in Nykøbing Falster, but he still goes down there whenever he has any questions about his tax affairs. When he looks at the tax authorities’ website, he isn’t able to work out how to make his return online.

Young Taxpayer

Portrait of a Citizen

”Interest paid to financial institutions? Employer-managed capital pension? Well, I’ve no idea what all that means. I’ve never been told what those words mean for me” he says, and begins to laugh when he is asked if his father might be able to help him. ”My dad can’t even turn on a computer.” Still, Dennis plans to study the tax system more at some point, because there are some things that he wonders about. Last year he took out a bank loan because he had to overdraw while Thilde was unemployed for a few months. He thinks that ought to affect his deductions, but exactly how he has no idea. ”My classmate, for example, gets all of his wages for his school apprenticeship paid out because he has a bank loan. As soon as I heard that, I thought I should probably also be getting the same thing, because we also have a loan. But I don’t know how to go about it”. So far, Dennis is content to make sure he always gets his annual tax certificate on paper. That’s what feels best to him. And although it can sometimes be slightly inconvenient to go to The Citizens Service Office to get help with his tax affairs, he will keep doing so. ”I would never dare to go in and mess about with my own taxes on the internet. It would be really annoying if I did something wrong and then had a huge liability for underpaid tax. ”

“I am completly blank on tax. I somehow imagine that the authorities walk around checking that everyone has paid their tax - but I have no idea where they get their information from!”

Away with the Red Tape

Solutions

Løsninger

Væk med bøvlet

Away with the Red Tape! Solutions that work Improving the experience of interacting with the state bureaucracy requires more than a cool examination of the number of rules and the time taken to complete a task. More diverse approaches are needed that build on citizen’s everyday experiences. Working in collaboration with our colleagues from the Ministry of Taxation (‘SKAT’), the Ministry of Employment and the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, MindLab has developed a number of different possible solutions that are intended to eliminate the experience of red tape for the three different groups of young people.

Away with the Red Tape

Solutions

Away with the Red Tape

Solution Type # 1

Solution Type # 3

Knowing What to Expect

Investing in Personal Contact

Having a clear overview of how a case is handled by government decreases the likelihood of misunderstandings and frustrations. We explored how case work can be made more transparent, so that decisions and experiences seem more reasonable to those affected by them. One solution consists of a package of introductory material for industrial injury victims. The material will lay out the entire case process in a graphic format; including clear indications of how and when the victim’s active participation will be needed. Another solution looked at how to ensure that citizens are made aware of what administrative and fiscal obligations they are committing themselves to before they register a new business.

Even the best IT solution cannot translate laws, rules and procedures to a citizen’s everyday situation as effectively as a face to face meeting with a caseworker. For this reason, the personal encounter can be used as a way of making an initial investment in a given citizen’s longer-term self-reliance on digital solutions. For instance, one solution involves caseworkers from the National Board of Industrial Injuries telephoning industrial injury victims at an early stage in the case process. In the course of a call they will explain to the individual how her case is going to be handled and what principles will be applied in reaching the eventual decision. In turn, the citizen will be able to ask clarifying questions and receive guidance on how to complete the National Board of Industrial Injuries’ questionnaires and forms.

Solution Type # 2

Solution Type # 4

From Digital Access to Digital Self-Reliance

Building Strategic Alliances

Citizens don’t just need digital literacy, they also need to understand how to complete a given task on line. This means that usability must be understood as more than a technical solution. For example, usability might include the provision of easily accessible information about the public administration way of working, or the use of instructional videos or personalized websites. One solution proposes that the tax authority and the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs should collaborate to produce a personal digital solution for all business owners in Denmark; through this, the business owners would be able to find all the information that is relevant for their particular businesses. Another solution uses a major graphic redesign and short video sequences to make the gateway to the tax authorities online self assessment system easier to use.

Caseworkers are just one out of many different actors that individual citizens typically meet in their encounter with state bureaucracy. Some of these actors come from other branches of the public sector, while others are not public servants at all. We looked at how to ensure that other actors contribute positively to the overall handling of cases and deliver the right information at the right time. In one solution, the tax authority will collaborate with banks, financial institutions and employers to tell young taxpayers about how to avoid liability for the underpayment of tax by amending their provisional tax returns. In another solution, the National Board of Industrial Injuries will cooperate with doctors and health care professionals on the provision of appropriate information when they submit notifications of industrial injury cases.

Away with the Red Tape

MindLab Slotsholmsgade 12 1216 København K Danmark +45 3392 3144 info@mind-lab.dk www.mind-lab.dk Content and editing: Johanne Mygind Runa Sabroe Christian Bason MindLab Design: Liv Maria Henning Marie Erstad MindLab Photos: Liv Maria Henning Marie Erstad MindLab Copies: 1000 Paper: Munken Polar 90g./130g./300g. Printing: Holmbergs, Malmö © MindLab 2010