Canada’s secret paperwork tax
The time tax refers to the many hours that people spend doing paperwork or other administrative 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 first article in our series on the time tax, the harms it causes, and how it might be fixed.
Sometimes time isn’t on your side.
In 1991, legendary computer game designers Sierra Entertainment released a not-so-legendary game called Jones in the Fast Lane. The game is a somewhat-twisted social simulation about achieving “success” in life, measured terms of money, career, education and happiness; it’s basically what you would get if you mixed the game play of The Game of Life and the jaded perspective of Office Space.
Each turn you start with a clock that ticks down as you go about your business. As you work, study, eat, job hunt, or pay bills, the pixelated clock turns from yellow to red. And each turn you also wake up to “fun” new surprises of why you have even less time to work with than usual that week.
The graphics in Jones are not exactly high definition but the game presents a clear picture of how processes and paperwork can make us all worse off. Accessing government services demands a lot of residents, with little to no consideration of how that fits into their lives. These impacts — what journalist Annie Lowrey calls the “time tax” — leave avoidable burdens on the shoulders of residents and quite often go directly against what those programs and services are trying to achieve.
What we are talking about here are the hoops we have to jump through to access public services. When we talk about administrative burdens, we are not talking about the rules we have to follow, but rather, the time and effort required to comply and the impact it has on people. When that process is hidden in a bureaucratic maze, requiring arbitrary forms, in-person appointments, or other hurdles, it makes it less likely that public programs and services reach people.
In some cases, those hurdles may be the goal of the designers. Raising the time taxes can be a tactic used by those who would like to reduce access to a program, either because they can’t do so directly or because it might be politically unattractive to restrict access in plain sight. But these burdens more often come from more unintentional (but structural) problems — a policymaking process that tends to stack “kludge” quick fixes on top of each other, and governments that struggle to take into account the perspectives of the people they are designing policies for. So if we start from a place that assumes that governments want their programs to work, cutting time taxes is a trillion dollar bill lying on the sidewalk — it’s just hard to see under the stack of paper forms.
Thinking about the time costs of interacting with government isn’t exactly a new idea. Governments and advocates spend quite a bit of time looking to “cut red tape” for businesses. The majority of the provinces and the federal government have active red tape reduction efforts; they have now been popular for decades with governments led by different parties.
To date, little of that effort has spilled over to administrative burdens on people. But that’s beginning to change. The 2022 Ontario Budget included an explicit commitment to tracking and reducing administrative burdens on residents. In the wake of the passport processing backlogs, the Government of Canada set up a new Ministerial task force to improve access to public services and has made commitments to improving access to benefits. These commitments line up with a broader international trend to focus on public service delivery, including a Biden administration agenda to improve “customer experience” with government.
But defining the problem is only the first step towards addressing it and alongside these political commitments Canadian governments are still making choices that add to the time tax burdens on residents. The choice in Ontario this year to remove the fee for license plate renewals but keep in place a poorly-communicated requirement to renew, at risk of fines, is a perfect example of a decision that comes from weighing the financial sticker price but not compliance costs. To reduce these time taxes, we need to change the way that governments make decisions, design services, and measure results.
This series will look at opportunities to do just that. It will include looking more closely at the sources of time tax in our experiences with public services, case studies in kludgeocracy, and some promising responses that could reduce the hold that paperwork has on our public lives. Our goal here is not to lay out all the answers — we don’t pretend to have them — but to support a better conversation so that these recent political commitments can translate into real change.
By Noah Zon
