Completing TT’s digital upgrade

INDEPENDENT Senator Paul Richards asked on Tuesday whether steps are being taken to prepare properly for a digital economy. It’s a timely query.

While enormous change has been triggered by the pandemic after decades of stagnation, there’s still room for further development.

With lockdown conditions in effect, many government services have gone online or leaned heavily in that direction. Online portals have been developed to deal with things like border exemptions. A portal for vaccine appointments is reportedly being prepared.

You can file tax returns online. Legislation has been enacted to allow electronic payments to be made for courts. Government agencies such as the Licensing Office now have an online system by which appointments are managed.

Before all this, many digital services were already in place. The commercial sector was already heading in the direction of a cashless society.

That journey has been accelerated out of sheer necessity.

But while many of the new measures remove the need for long lines, there is still a degree of in-person interaction between state officials and members of the public. For instance, after getting an appointment, citizens are still engaged by customer-service representatives at the Licensing Office.

Mr Richards’s query was premised on further considerations. A digital society will need to fend off digital crime, including fraud, unauthorised access and data breaches. This requires special infrastructure, digital protection measures and redundancies.

Inequalities of access, particularly with regard to the elderly and rural economies, are also relevant. If the State’s digital technology has a limited reach, it will effectively disenfranchise some, as we have seen with the issue of school laptops.

The large number of people who do not engage with financial institutions also poses a challenge to this programme of reform. While state officials assure such people will be treated equally in the range of online services provided (this was a factor in a recently introduced measure involving the Judiciary), it is not entirely self-evident that a seamless solution is possible.

This points to the fact that digitisation cannot simply be a copy-and-paste affair but must involve coming up with solutions from the ground up, oriented towards local conditions: conditions that might not translate well on the global electronic stage.

There needs to be an up-to-date assessment of the degree of electronic access available to various segments of the country, as well as usage practices.

Meanwhile, as we venture into a brave new world, there is also the need to use electronic tools more effectively and to support them with better levels of communication.

The absurd case of a man being arrested for not paying a fine that he had actually paid is a good example of what should not take place in a world where up-to-date information should be at the fingertips of all state officials sitting behind computers.