From openness to sustainability

My daughter is studying psychology and explains all our actions with different theories. Something like that got started last week on the Open Knowledge Festival.

On Wednesday Ministry of Finance arranged an open "hackathon" (F) for developing a country plan in order to join Open Government Partnership along with 70 other countries.

Open government, Open knowledge, Open data.. 

Opening data has been on agenda for a year now. Short-sightedly, I have settled for aiming to opening up government spending.

Last week I came across with broader views that obviously had been there for me to find. With a colleague from Isle of Man we discussed how to find and visualize the influence behind faceless enterprises. How to spot the power links in the world economy and what exactly is the thing that needs to be opened if we aim to find the real places of influence?

Customer journeys in one's own mother tongue

Data visualization came up in Visualizing Knowledge (F) seminar on Monday. Rob Waller linked literacy built on structured documents with the concept of customer journey.

On Thursday I got a sort of a wake up call on the real significance of mother tongue. I got acquainted with contract visualization already on Monday, in English. But it wasn't until M!ND researcher Stefania Passera gave the same speech in Finnish, my own mother tongue, that really got my own thinking going.

As the pieces gained their familiarity in Finnish I became able to apply the newly learned methods in the phenomena in my own work.

So this is what it means to really understand what the official actually wants of me!

Open data is not knowledge, interpretation creates understanding

In the end we got taught by a living legend. Hans Rosling so knows how to visualize "boring" data, how to interpret it and how to communicate the phenomena lurking behind millions of rows of raw data. If Bush can get it, so can you, he concluded :)

Opening data, knowledge and government means more.
Openness is the way to sustainability.

From beggars to better customer service

It's a winning ticket in lottery to be born in Finland (and stay in Finland). No need to scrape bank accounts in order to be able to pay one's taxes nor try to find a way to pay them. You don't even have that much to declare any more.

We've been able to arrange declaring as automatic as possible for the citizen. This is possible firstly with tax card (F) with which employers and other payers withhold tax on behalf of the citizen and pay him the net amount. In the end of each year, payers file annual notification (F) on the amounts paid to and for the citizen. This information is then printed in the citizen's tax return.

My cousin filed her tax return in Great Britain at about the same time, in the beginning of May. She needed to report all the six jobs, draw them from her personal filing system and report separately to HMRC. No data available from previous years. What the service did offer, was a few intelligent questions to rule out things not relevant in this customer segment. 

In Finland tax payer morale is exemplary. Last year we received a question from a customer on poker income. "I didn't know I needed to file it, can I still make it right this year?" asked a young guy admirably.

The latest example is Helsingin Sanomat Editor-in-Chief Riikka Venäläinen asking for help in reporting (Apua arjen pahiksille, F). We need better guidance in order to make it right! she rightfully demands.

From beggars to better customer service

In Italy tax authorities still attempt to effect attitudes: if you don't pay your taxes, you're a parasite: Parassita della Società, in YouTube. In Georgia, previously a Soviet state, tax administration needed to find the tax payers and their addresses in order to fill in their customer registry. The US, on the other hand, passed a law, FATCA, that demands that worldwide financial institutions file the information on behalf of US citizens - in case they didn't.

In comparison, our tax authorities are allowed to concentrate on designing better services to ensure maximum filing (where still needed). It is our aim to automate and streamline data gathering further so that it become less and less burdensome.

In our R&D efforts we try to find the most efficient and innovative ways to take care of what little reporting obligations there still remains.

This year I for one didn't even bother to open my tax return on paper. Everything I needed was in the web: receipts in my web bank or Amazon, self-aggregated reports in Google Docs etc.

Taxation in web bank?

In taxation the outcome is more or less an invoice. It is either debit or credit: you'll be granted a refund for excessive amount of taxes withheld according to your tax card or you are due an amount equaling underpayment. And the summary presents all the details of which the outcome consists of.

In this thinking tax return is my statement on the preliminary invoice. My demands for deductions adjust the calculation of the amount due.

If I were to decide, I'd send the tax invoice straight to my web bank - no more paper invoices, thank you very much! All the details needed in evaluation or corrections already await there. The most used attachments are certificates of the interests, summaries of stock exchange sales or dividends.

Would it be possible to adjust the amounts in taxation while in web bank? At least one could enter Tax Return Online while there, right?

Close the gaps on customer journey!

Riikka Venäläinen described what happens, when customer journey is not well planned. An excellent journey offers all the things needed but only the ones needed. Who else would know better what is needed than tax authorities?

Helsingin Sanomat is already answering the call to development by opening a blog (Virka-aika, in Finnish) Firstly, they want to gather citizen's experiences on poor customer experiences in public authorities. Secondly, they search for solutions collaboratively.

Tax administration says thank you and takes part in the project.