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Estonia Sharing Its Finnish-Made E-Government Solution With Finland
paavo512 writes "For the last decade or so, Estonia has developed a national electronic data exchange layer called X-Road. Is is based on national electronic ID cards and allows creation of common electronic services like founding a company, declaring taxes or e-voting. Every day, over 800,000 enquiries are made via X-Road (the population of Estonia is 1.3M). According to the PM of Estonia, the solution is saving 2% of national GDP annually. The Estonian ID card technology was originally imported from Finland; however, it appears Finns have for 10 years failed to come up with any significant e-services making use of them. So it is now agreed that Estonian X-Road solution will be expanding to Finland as well."
You end up with a choice of: 1) wait for the service to come back up; or 2) visit an office in person and talk to a civil servant.
Basically the same choice you have when your bank's internet banking is down. If you need to initiate a transfer, you either wait for it to come back up, or you walk into a bank to do it. If their backend system is down, you can't walk into a bank either, so you just wait in that case. Same here; if you want to register a new corporation and the site is down, you either fill out the registration on paper and submit it the old-fashioned way, or you wait for the site to come back up.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Perhaps the next iteration of healthcare.gov could be outsourced there. Just a thought.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I'm not a big user (e.g. I sign my company's annual reports once a year), but I know other poeple who use it a lot more, and I've never known the ID card infrastructure to be down. That's one of the benefits of a small country - we'll never have to cope with a third of a billion people wanting to use a system.
The biggest issue I had was java/driver/OS incompatibilities which mean that I can only use the card and card-reader on my g/f's x86_64 machine, not my POWER machine, nor my x86 laptop (all running linux). Anyone with delusions that java actually actually runs everywhere at this juncture should be taken outside and put out of my misery.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Well, then, I'll help you.
PLEASE US Feds and State leaders, pass by this idea, don't dwell on it and for God's sake, don't try to implement it.
We can't even get a fucking website working...please don't fuck with a National ID...we'll all be screwed.
It won't work here....just tell us a tax amount, and leave us alone!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Erwise: Started March 1992, Released April, 1992
WorldWideWeb: Proposed in 1989, Started late 1990, Released August 1991
I don't think "before" means what you think it means, but I'll accept the other three.
However, in Estonia, we tend to solve problems for about 1/20th of the budget of other countries. And deliver more quickly. And work. There was a healthcare example about a year or so ago. Some big consultancy said they could tweak the already-up-and-running system Finland was using for something stupid like a hundred million. We said "screw you", and wrote something better from scratch for about 5 million, which was set up in a way that it could be tweaked for other countries' use for next-to-nothing. (And yes, that was *tweaks* for a hundred million.)
I suspect that that particular healthcare thing is indeed part of this larger e-Government solution.
Everyone else designed the one to throw away. Finally, there's one worth keeping. (And no, I'm not blowing my own trumpet, I had no involvement with it at all, I'm not even sure which company was behind it.)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
You know that the "tell us a tax amount" is a thing that other countries can do because of unified national identity databases, right? In some places, you don't have to "do your taxes". The government just sends you a bill for what they didn't take out over the year.
No, it's because their tax code isn't so bloated and screwed up as ours. Printed on 8.5x11, the US tax code is 74,000 pages long (well, actually 73,954).
The fact that the IRS can come knocking on your door and send you fines for not filing your taxes is pretty clear that they don't need a cross-agency centralized national identity database to do so.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
The single only platform java will ever run on is the jvm. It indeed is one of the least portable languages around.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
You know, I was about to add a reply to the person you replied to, but then I read your post and it could not be more spot on!!
The person above you was apparently only talking about personal tax too, for a country. It's a different story here in the US as that you also have state and sometimes city taxation to deal with too, and if you're a business owner, or working 1099 contracting, well...a whole new kettle of fish there.
No, a national ID wouldn't help this at all. Currently the answer is, if you have tax requirements above the 1099 EZ form for the Feds, just is best to hire a CPA and let them deal with it.
I certainly do wish we had an easier, more straightforward system, some sort of flat tax or national sales tax. But that would relieve the Feds of too much power and hence, we'll likely never get there.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Angry Birds.
Dude, if you think that having separate driving license, passport and insurance number makes you somehow harder to track, then you are completely delusional.
Mmmm,
I first saw what the Estonians were doing in 2001 or 2002.
At the time I said to all and sundry how amazed i was with what the Estonians were able to do on a small budget, against what the so-called giants of the technological world were doing routinely spending billions for a hundreds of invariably failed major IT projects. Estonia did have the 'advantages' of, first coming to the arena of 'modernisation' and IT integration late, second not having a heap of spare cash to blow on IT projects, third having to build their infrastructure and software ecology from the ground up, and fourth being able to integrate many disparate players (but most critically the banks and financial sector) from Day 1.
That said, what they did (on what we in the rest of the world would call 'pennies') still remains one of the most cost effective, efficient, useful and pervasive IT value adding I've ever seen. They didn't invest much in 'big metal', or huge development teams, or bring on board massive communications, hardware, and software consortiums ... they concentrated on what could be done with a small to mid range systems client-server environment running back-end database packages for Web and other open standards based front ends ... and surprisingly they coordinated it all so that it all worked together relatively seamlessly. As the elements of the system came online, they got new stakeholders onboard, developed new functionality and applications, and incorporated that into their.
The Estonians I met at a conference in Canada asked me to write a paper outlining my support for, and opinions of, their efforts, to be used to support some acquisitions they had in mind for the next government budget .... which I was delighted to do.
If any government or major enterprise is going to embark on a major IT project in the near future, I'd recommend they look at how the Estonians do it. For 1/10 of the cost or better Estonia can develop and integrate systems, and add immense value, convenience and functionality to its citizens lives .... which is way better than any other country I've seen over the last 10-20 years.
Then perhaps it should work like a group of united States. Where states are left up to their own vices for setting up laws and services. And if one state does something that another likes they can adopt it. Like Finland adopting Estonia's system. And the federal government is left to do little more than the EU does. Central currency, regulate trade between states, etc.