Reducing the time tax burdens on Canadians

The time tax refers to the many hours that people spend doing paperwork or other tasks just to receive government services and supports. At its worst, the time tax can be regressive, wasteful, and ineffective. Despite this, the time tax often flies under the radar. We think it deserves more attention. This is the eighth and final article in our series on the time tax, the harms it causes, and how it might be fixed.

As the case studies we highlighted in this series make clear, time taxes are not a single point of failure that can be ‘fixed’ with a new policy approach, or legislative change, or more resources. It is systemic — as long as we have public institutions that are geared towards more abstract ideas of accountability instead of the needs of the public they are meant to serve, we will keep getting new programs and policies that add costs to people’s lives.

A systemic issue requires systemic solutions. Looking across Canada and around the world, there are a number of promising approaches that can be built into the way governments work to help reduce some of the worst burdens and help to design services so that unnecessary requirements don’t get in in the first place.

Building around people’s lives.

The time tax can be reduced by thinking about the everyday, actual experiences of users and how they access services. How government services are used and accessed shouldn’t only be decided on from the top down. Instead, a more bottom-up approach would build on user needs and would respond with services based on those needs.

Building around life events — like the birth of a child or retirement — is a way to combine the many interactions that people have with government services into more distinct, easily navigable groups. For example, Canada and Ontario have worked together to create a one-window “5-in-1 newborn bundle” letting you handle birth registration, Social Insurance Number, and child benefits in one go. Not only do these events often trigger a need to engage with public services, they are the times when people typically have the least spare bandwidth to manage that burden.

Some work is being done from outside government to help people navigate the complexity of accessing government services. For example, the Benefits Screening Tool is a resource from non-profit Prosper Canada, to help Canadians who are struggling financial to navigate and access income benefits. You can find similar efforts at various places in the community where people turn — community agencies, public libraries and doctor’s offices are often doing this work informally in addition to their core jobs.

A team of sludge fighters

Because the time tax can be found just about everywhere, one approach to limit it is to develop a dedicated team within government that works across departments to reduce various time taxes. Such a team could include a combination of behavioural scientists, UI/UX designers, digital services experts, and staff with expertise in cross-departmental collaboration. Beyond building up resources and expertise, a key advantage of this kind of approach is to flip the typical incentives put in front of public servants — valuing streamlining instead of minimizing risks.

These “sludge fighters” could work with departments, residents, and front-line service providers to streamline and simplify complex bureaucratic processes. But to be effective, these teams need to be a resource and not the whole effort; better outcomes depend on culture change right across government. The Australian government recently piloted a way of engaging a range of public servants in the fight against sludge — they held a “formapalooza” — a one-day event in which public servants worked to design better forms.

The once-only principle

One frustrating and time consuming part of navigating public services is being asked to repeat the same information over and over again. In-person or online, residents often have to provide the same information — address, date of birth, login credentials multiple times and in multiple places. “Once-only” refers to information sharing between services that prevents users from having to enter the same information multiple times. Establishing a once-only principle across government services could drastically cut down on administrative burdens, especially if local, provincial, territorial, and federal governments collaborated.

A once-only principle does not need to mean government is pooling more information about residents. The idea that information shared once might be shared all over government makes people understandably easy — and can even discourage access. But if residents are in control of that information and who accesses it, they can be empowered to save time. An example of the once-only principle meeting building around life events is the Australian death notification service. To lighten the burden at the hardest time in someone’s life, residents can use the serve to let a variety of organizations — government, utilities, banks, pensions — know that a loved one has died with a single notification.

To make the once-only principle even stronger, governments could choose to reduce what service providers ask to only be things they really need to know to provide a service. For example, the entire process of filing personal income taxes is essentially telling the Canada Revenue Agency what they already know. But this doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, some 36 countries already use return-free tax filing for at least some of their citizens.

High-quality digital IDs

Moving access to services online can make a big difference in making sure people get access to services. For example, Code for America found that required in-person appointments were a major barrier to young mothers with low-income accessing food aid for themselves and their children. As one participant said.

I stopped [getting WIC] with both kids for the same reason. It was just too hard…you have to take off work to go to the office. They wouldn’t mail [vouchers] to you. I’d have to go into the office for an appointment.

But simply moving existing requirements onto existing online systems isn’t enough. One source of complexity in navigating public services is the need to keep a long list of separate government accounts to do different tasks. For example, Ontario government accounts include both a ONe-key and a “My Ontario Account.” Some federal services might be through CRA, some through Service Canada, some through entirely different channels. Collaborating to allow for a high-quality digital ID could make this easier on residents and service providers.

A single digital ID could store information from drivers’ licenses, health care cards, passports and online profiles, particularly if provincial and federal governments could find ways to integrate digitally. This is already happening in some places — the BC Services card app or the MyAlberta digital ID can be used to login to one’s CRA account. Many provinces have begun to develop digital IDs, although federal plans for one haven’t been announced.

It won’t be simple. The roll-out of digital IDs will need cross-government coordination, significant planning and infrastructure to ensure stringent privacy and security, and an approach that aims to reduce time taxes from the outset. But if Canada can manage a mission to the moon, secure and user-friendly digital IDs should be attainable.

Audits and counts

In his book Sludge, Cass Sunstein suggests a “sludge audit” — where institutions must count the administrative burdens they impose, and use a cost-benefit analysis to understand where burdens are excessive. Something similar is a “one-for-one” rule — meaning that for every new administrative burden introduced, an existing burden must be removed.

In Canada, rules like these have only ever been made to address business red tape. For example, the 2015 Red Tape Reduction Act implemented a one-for-one rule for regulations impacting business. BC’s longstanding “one new regulation in, two out” requirement goes a step further, and is considered a leading example of red tape reduction for business. The federal Administrative Burden Baseline (ABB) initiative, meanwhile, requires departments to publicly report regulations that impose burdens on businesses. In an internal review of the Red Tape Reduction Act, the Treasury Board Secretariat mentioned possible efforts “to address administrative burden on individual citizens”.

Start by valuing time and outcomes

With all the cases of time tax spread throughout public services, and all the institutional incentives and practices stacked against simplicity, this could be seen as a discouraging story. That’s not the way we see it. In most cases, time taxes are an example of how much improvement is possible if we simply get the sludge out of the way between people who need public services and the programs we’ve designed to serve them.

We can build on many of the lessons from decades of efforts to reduce red tape for businesses. But we’ll also need some new tools in the toolkit. Businesses have more resources, representation and economic incentive to point out the roadblocks they face than residents do, so finding out what works will depend on more proactive user research.

The approaches listed here are all about shifting the default way that public services are designed and administered. If we start to place value on people’s time, we won’t have governments ask for information we don’t need. And if we give governments a real mandate to serve humans instead of eliminating all risk, we can see much better results.

By Khiran O’Neill and Noah Zon