Estonia, the most digitized nation in Europe

Estonia has overcome the fear of living in a kind of Orwellian Big Brother and has become a "highly digitized" society. This small country of 1.3 millions of inhabitants began to digitize with the e-Estonia State Portal program, through which the government was able to offer all its online services with a double objective: innovation and, above all, as part of a plan to solve their budgetary limitations.

The Estonians trusted their rulers and they in the country's engineers to build innovative tools without committing to any kind of hardware or software.The result was a project deexito, which can now benefit the rest of European countries.

the principles of digital estonia

Among the most outstanding measures of the digitalization of Estonia we find the principle of »only once»: The state cannot ask citizens for the same information twice.Therefore, the data they will not be repeated in the database of any department of the public administration.

This "one time only" principle has been so successful that, based on Estonia's innovation, the European Union approved the "one time digital" initiative earlier this year, as we have read on Magnet Xataka.The key to this measure is that the public bodies are organized to share this data internally , so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses.

Also, another principle is to use citizen data only if there are two good causes. Governments must constantly be looking for new solutions and ask, for example, if the information that a government agency needs can be exploited by someone else and that can be obtained from the data.

Another of the star measures was the strategy that Estonia launched in 2014 to combat tax fraud that requires that every business transaction of more than € 1,000 has to be declared monthly by the parties involved Thanks to this, the Tax and Customs Board has become an example of how it is possible to change the bad reputation of the treasury.

To minimize the administrative burden of this procedure, the government introduced an application programming interface that allows information to be automatically exchanged between the company's accounting software and the state's tax system.

a great idea against tax fraud

Although this decree generated rejection at first, it has had spectacular success.In fact, Estonia has doubled its original estimate of reducing tax fraud by 30 million euros. Other countries such as Latvia, Spain, Belgium, Romania and Hungary have taken similar measures to control and detect tax fraud, but their true potential lies in the analysis of information beyond tax fraud.

Big data, data analytics and prediction models will play a leading role in the next wave of innovation of this electronic government.The Estonian Tax and Customs Board launched its Strategic Plan 2020 that reflects a change in mentality: From punishment to taxpayer advice.

Currently, dozens of people are dedicated to collecting, analyzing and filtering this type of data on the business sector, but it is possible to automate this work using fiscal data.The main problem of this great idea of Estonia is the Privacy. In fact, one of the fundamental principles of the OECD Guidelines on the protection of privacy is that data should only be used for the stated purpose and not for any other reason, however, respecting some clearly established limits, using data beyond its original purpose can benefit the entire society.

Featured photography: Pixabay.com

Source: Magnet Xataka

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