Why are America’s Tax Forms Still so Horribly Designed?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Meg Miller at Co.Design: “If there’s one issue that this divided nation can agree upon, it’s a common hatred of the federal government’s dizzying, overly complicated tax forms. Show me one person who enjoys digging up last year’s return and embarking on a byzantine quest through tax credits, deductions, exemptions, and withholdings, all for a measly return, and I’ll show you a masochist. Surely, simplifying the forms and the process—shifting the burden from individual taxpayers to the tax specialists at the Internal Revenue Service—is a bipartisan issue that we can all get behind.

Alas, it is not.

Since the government already has all of the information that we put on our tax forms, it would be completely feasible for the IRS to hand us prefilled tax forms that we could review and modify if needed—eliminating most of the headache of filing. Countries like Sweden, Finland, and Spain do it already. Yet in the U.S., some moneyed third-party tax preparers oppose government tax preparation—because, according to Propublica, it poses a risk to their business. The nonprofit news organization, which has covered this topic for years, reports that big private tax companies like H&R Block and Intuit, which owns TurboTax, have been lobbying against simplifying the filing process for nearly a decade. (For its part, Intuit denies that these assertions are factually accurate.)

Regardless, all of this means that taxpayers in the U.S. are faced with a choice: file online through a tax preparer service like TurboTax or H&R Block At Home, hire an accountant, or try to navigate this mess on your own.

In fact, each year, consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers ranks 189 countries by the complexity of their taxes—and this year, the U.S. came in 35th….

Another indicator of a tax process that doesn’t disproportionately put the onus on the filer is the design of the tax form itself….

For example, Finland’s tax forms are divided neatly into columns and each section is boxed off for clarity. The portions the filer needs to fill are highlighted in a faint baby blue. It’s seven pages of clear language and guiding visual signifiers.

Oh and also—it’s filled out for you, so that all you need to do is review and approve or modify. That’s true user-friendly design.

The true indicator of a simple tax form, then, isn’t the graphic design of the form—this is very clearly a UX problem. The forms I found online varied from clearly legible to impossible to understand, regardless of the country. In that way, tax policy is what would benefit most from a redesign, especially given that the users, in this case, are tax-paying citizens….(More)”

Welcome to E-Estonia, the tiny nation that’s leading Europe in digital innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation: “Big Brother does “just want to help” – in Estonia, at least. In this small nation of 1.3 million people, citizens have overcome fears of an Orwellian dystopia with ubiquitous surveillance to become a highly digital society.

The government took nearly all its services online in 2003 with the e-Estonia State Portal. The country’s innovative digital governance was not the result of a carefully crafted master plan, it was a pragmatic and cost-efficient response to budget limitations.

It helped that citizens trusted their politicians after Estonia regained independence in 1991. And, in turn, politicians trusted the country’s engineers, who had no commitment to legacy hardware or software systems, to build something new.

This proved to be a winning formula that can now benefit all the European countries.

The once-only principle

With its digital governance, Estonia introduced the “once-only” principle, mandating that the state is not allowed to ask citizens for the same information twice.

In other words, if you give your address or a family member’s name to the census bureau, the health insurance provider will not later ask you for it again. No department of any government agency can make citizens repeat information already stored in their database or that of some other agency….The once-only principle has been such a big success that, based on Estonia’s common-sense innovation, the EU enacted a digital Once Only Principle and Initiative early this year. It ensures that “citizens and businesses supply certain standard information only once, because public administration offices take action to internally share this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses.”…

‘Twice-mandatory’ principle

Governments should always be brainstorming, asking themselves, for example, if one government agency needs this information, who else might benefit from it? And beyond need, what insights could we glean from this data?

Financier Vernon Hill introduced an interesting “One to Say YES, Two to Say NO” rule when founding Metro Bank UK: “It takes only one person to make a yes decision, but it requires two people to say no. If you’re going to turn away business, you need a second check for that.”

Imagine how simple and powerful a policy it would be if governments learnt this lesson. What if every bit of information collected from citizens or businesses had to be used for two purposes (at least!) or by two agencies in order to merit requesting it?

The Estonian Tax and Customs Board is, perhaps unexpectedly given the reputation of tax offices, an example of the potential for such a paradigm shift. In 2014, it launched a new strategy to address tax fraud, requiring every business transaction of over €1,000 to be declared monthly by the entities involved.

To minimise the administrative burden of this, the government introduced an application-programming interface that allows information to be automatically exchanged between the company’s accounting software and the state’s tax system.

Though there was some negative push back in the media at the beginning by companies and former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves even vetoed the initial version of the act, the system was a spectacular success. Estonia surpassed its original estimate of €30 million in reduced tax fraud by more than twice.

Latvia, Spain, Belgium, Romania, Hungary and several others have taken a similar path for controlling and detecting tax fraud. But analysing this data beyond fraud is where the real potential is hidden….(More).”

Open Data Maturity in Europe 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Data Portal Report: “…the second in a series of annual studies and explores the level of Open Data Maturity in the EU28 and Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein – referred to as EU28+. The measurement is built on two key indicators Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity, thereby covering the level of development of national activities promoting Open Data as well as the level of development of national portals. In 2016, with a 28.6% increase compared to 2015, the EU28+ countries completed over 55% of their Open Data journey showing that, by 2016, a majority of the EU28+ countries have successfully developed a basic approach to address Open Data. The Portal Maturity level increased by 22.6 percentage points from 41.7% to 64.3% thanks to the development of more advanced features on country data portals. The overall Open Data Maturity groups countries into different clusters: Beginners, Followers, Fast Trackers and Trend Setters. Barriers do remain to move Open Data forward. The report concludes on a series of recommendations, providing countries with guidance to further improve Open Data maturity. Countries need to raise more (political) awareness around Open Data, increase automated processes on their portals to increase usability and re-usability of data, and organise more events and trainings to support both local and national initiatives….(More)”.

Towards an experimental culture in government: reflections on and from practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Jesper Christiansen et al at Nesta: “…we share some initial reflections from this work with the hope of prompting a useful discussion about how to articulate the value of experimentation as well as what to consider when strategically planning and doing experiments in government contexts.

Reflection 1: Experimentation as a way of accelerating learning and exploring “the room of the non-obvious”

Governments need to increase their pace and agility in learning about which ideas have the highest potential value-creation and make people’s lives the rationale of governing.

Experimental approaches accelerate learning by systematically testing assumptions and identifying knowledge gaps. What is there to be known about the problem and the function, fit and probability of a suggested solution? Experimentation helps fill these gaps without allocating too much time or resource, and helps governments accelerate the exploration of new potential solution spaces.

This approach is often a key contribution of government policy labs and public sector innovation teams. Units like Lab para la Ciudad in Mexico City, Alberta Co-Lab in Canada, Behavioural insights and Design Unit in Singapore, MindLab in Denmark and Policy Lab in the UK are specifically set up to promote, develop and/or embed experimental approaches and accelerate user-centred learning in different levels of government.

In addition, creating a culture of experimentation extends the policy options available by creating a political environment to test non-linear approaches to wicked problems. In our training, we often distinguish between “the room of the obvious” and the “room of the non-obvious”. By designing portfolios of experiments that include – by deliberate design – the testing of at least some non-linear, non-obvious solutions, government officials can move beyond the automatic mode of many policy interventions and explore the “room of the non-obvious” in a safe-to-fail context (think barbers to prevent suicides or dental insurance to prevent deforestation).

Reflection 2: Experimentation as a way of turning uncertainty into risk

In everyday language, uncertainty and risk are two notions that are often used interchangeably; yet they are very different concepts. Take, for example, the implementation of a solution. Risk is articulated in terms of the probability that the solution will generate a certain outcome. It is measurable (e.g. based on existing data there is X per cent chance of success, or X per cent chance of failure) and qualitative risk factors can be developed and described.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is a situation where there is a lack of probabilities. There is no prior data on how the solution might perform; future outcomes are not known, and can therefore not be measured. The chance of success can be 0 per cent, 100 per cent, or anything in between (see table below).

There is often talk of the need for government to become more of a ‘risk taker’, or to become better at ‘managing risk’. But as Marco Steinberg, founder of strategic design practice Snowcone & Haystack, recently reminded us, risk-management – where probabilities are known – is actually something that governments do quite well. Issues arise when governments’ legacies can’t shape current solutions: when governments have to deal with the uncertainty of complex challenges by adapting or creating entirely new service systems to fit the needs of our time.

For example, when transforming a health system to fit the needs of our time, little can be known about the probabilities in terms of what might work when establishing a new practice. Or when transforming a social care system to accommodate the lives of vulnerable families, entirely new concepts for solutions need to be explored. “If you don’t have a map showing the way, you have to write one yourself,” as Sam Rye puts it in his inspirational example on the use of experimental cards at The Labs Wananga….

Reflection 3: Experimentation as a way to reframe failure and KPIs

Reflection 4: Experimentation on a continuum between exploration and validation

Reflection 5: Experimentation as cultural change…(More)”.

Nudging people to make good choices can backfire

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bruce Bower in ScienceNews: “Nudges are a growth industry. Inspired by a popular line of psychological research and introduced in a best-selling book a decade ago, these inexpensive behavior changers are currently on a roll.

Policy makers throughout the world, guided by behavioral scientists, are devising ways to steer people toward decisions deemed to be in their best interests. These simple interventions don’t force, teach or openly encourage anyone to do anything. Instead, they nudge, exploiting for good — at least from the policy makers’ perspective — mental tendencies that can sometimes lead us astray.

But new research suggests that low-cost nudges aimed at helping the masses have drawbacks. Even simple interventions that work at first can lead to unintended complications, creating headaches for nudgers and nudgees alike…

Promising results of dozens of nudge initiatives appear in two government reports issued last September. One came from the White House, which released the second annual report of its Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. The other came from the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team. Created by the British government in 2010, the U.K. group is often referred to as the Nudge Unit.

In a September 20, 2016, Bloomberg View column, Sunstein said the new reports show that nudges work, but often increase by only a few percentage points the number of people who, say, receive government benefits or comply with tax laws. He called on choice architects to tackle bigger challenges, such as finding ways to nudge people out of poverty or into higher education.

Missing from Sunstein’s comments and from the government reports, however, was any mention of a growing conviction among some researchers that well-intentioned nudges can have negative as well as positive effects. Accepting automatic enrollment in a company’s savings plan, for example, can later lead to regret among people who change jobs frequently or who realize too late that a default savings rate was set too low for their retirement needs. E-mail reminders to donate to a charity may work at first, but annoy recipients into unsubscribing from the donor list.

“I don’t want to get rid of nudges, but we’ve been a bit too optimistic in applying them to public policy,” says behavioral economist Mette Trier Damgaard of Aarhus University in Denmark.

Nudges, like medications for physical ailments, require careful evaluation of intended and unintended effects before being approved, she says. Policy makers need to know when and with whom an intervention works well enough to justify its side effects.

Default downer

That warning rings especially true for what is considered a shining star in the nudge universe — automatic enrollment of employees in retirement savings plans. The plans, called defaults, take effect unless workers decline to participate….

But little is known about whether automatic enrollees are better or worse off as time passes and their personal situations change, says Harvard behavioral economist Brigitte Madrian. She coauthored the 2001 paper on the power of default savings plans.

Although automatic plans increase savings for those who otherwise would have squirreled away little or nothing, others may lose money because they would have contributed more to a self-directed retirement account, Madrian says. In some cases, having an automatic savings account may encourage irresponsible spending or early withdrawals of retirement money (with penalties) to cover debts. Such possibilities are plausible but have gone unstudied.

In line with Madrian’s concerns, mathematical models developed by finance professor Bruce Carlin of the University of California, Los Angeles and colleagues suggest that people who default into retirement plans learn less about money matters, and share less financial information with family and friends, than those who join plans that require active investment choices.

Opt-out savings programs “have been oversimplified to the public and are being sold as a great way to change behavior without addressing their complexities,” Madrian says. Research needs to address how well these plans mesh with individuals’ personalities and decision-making styles, she recommends….

Researchers need to determine how defaults and other nudges instigate behavior changes before unleashing them on the public, says philosopher of science Till Grüne-Yanoff of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm….

Sometimes well-intentioned, up-front attempts to get people to do what seems right come back to bite nudgers on the bottom line.

Consider e-mail prompts and reminders. ….A case in point is a study submitted for publication by Damgaard and behavioral economist Christina Gravert of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. E-mailed donation reminders sent to people who had contributed to a Danish anti-poverty charity increased the number of donations in the short term, but also triggered an upturn in the number of people unsubscribing from the list.

People’s annoyance at receiving reminders perceived as too frequent or pushy cost the charity money over the long haul, Damgaard holds. Losses of list subscribers more than offset the financial gains from the temporary uptick in donations, she and Gravert conclude.

“Researchers have tended to overlook the hidden costs of nudging,” Damgaard says….(More)”

Google DeepMind and healthcare in an age of algorithms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julia Powles and Hal Hodson in Health and Technology: “Data-driven tools and techniques, particularly machine learning methods that underpin artificial intelligence, offer promise in improving healthcare systems and services. One of the companies aspiring to pioneer these advances is DeepMind Technologies Limited, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Google conglomerate, Alphabet Inc. In 2016, DeepMind announced its first major health project: a collaboration with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, to assist in the management of acute kidney injury. Initially received with great enthusiasm, the collaboration has suffered from a lack of clarity and openness, with issues of privacy and power emerging as potent challenges as the project has unfolded. Taking the DeepMind-Royal Free case study as its pivot, this article draws a number of lessons on the transfer of population-derived datasets to large private prospectors, identifying critical questions for policy-makers, industry and individuals as healthcare moves into an algorithmic age….(More)”

Just Change: How to Collaborate for Lasting Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tynesia Boyea-Robinson: “… is a collection of stories and case studies to evolve the way we think about and approach systemic causes of inequities facing low-income communities, particularly communities of color. The book successfully addresses:

  • Cross-sector collaboration as a requirement for sustainable social change;
  • Moving away from siloed programs with single-focused solutions to building systems and infrastructures that improve inequities at the population-level; and
  • Reframing how to think about and measure success in order to achieve scale and impact.

Read about leaders across the country who have successfully created sustainable, long-lasting solutions to address key root causes of inequities in their communities:

  • How the Detroit Corridor Initiative, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis-St Paul used shared results for successful cross-sector partnerships
  • How Nexus Community Partners in Minneapolis changed how they collaborate with the community they’re serving towards a more authentic community engagement
  • How Best Start for Kids in Seattle/King County effectively used cross-sector partnerships
  • How Camden City in New Jersey partnered with Campbell’s Soup for better health outcomes

Discover tested tools and strategies to implement change in your own communities, such as:

  • How the Model Behavior, Align Resources, Catalyze Change (MAC) framework harnesses intrinsic motivation for behavior change
  • How the Data Inventory helps you figure out what data needs to be collected and how to get it
  • Four components of creating effective shared results that will drive your cross-sector partnership towards success…(More)”.

Migration tracking is a mess

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Huub Dijstelbloem in Nature: “As debates over migration, refugees and freedom of movement intensify, technologies are increasingly monitoring the movements of people. Biometric passports and databases containing iris scans or fingerprints are being used to check a person’s right to travel through or stay within a territory. India, for example, is establishing biometric identification for its 1.3 billion citizens.

But technologies are spreading beyond borders. Security policies and humanitarian considerations have broadened the landscape. Drones and satellite images inform policies and direct aid to refugees. For instance, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), maps refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere with its Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT; see www.unitar.org/unosat/map/1928).

Three areas are in need of research, in my view: the difficulties of joining up disparate monitoring systems; privacy issues and concerns over the inviolability of the human body; and ‘counter-surveillance’ deployed by non-state actors to highlight emergencies or contest claims that governments make.

Ideally, state monitoring of human mobility would be bound by ethical principles, solid legislation, periodical evaluations and the checks and balances of experts and political and public debates. In reality, it is ad hoc. Responses are arbitrary, fuelled by the crisis management of governments that have failed to anticipate global and regional migration patterns. Too often, this results in what the late sociologist Ulrich Beck called organized irresponsibility: situations of inadequacy in which it is hard to blame a single actor.

Non-governmental organizations, activists and migrant groups are using technologies to register incidents and to blame and shame states. For example, the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used satellite imagery and other evidence to reconstruct the journey of a boat that left Tripoli on 27 March 2011 with 72 passengers. A fortnight later, it returned to the Libyan coast with just 9 survivors. Although the boat had been spotted by several aircraft and vessels, no rescue operation had been mounted (go.nature.com/2mbwvxi). Whether the states involved can be held accountable is still being considered.

In the end, technologies to monitor mobility are political tools. Their aims, design, use, costs and consequences should be developed and evaluated accordingly….(More)”.

Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hughes in The Next Web: “Question: Is Facebook a country? It sounds silly, but when you think about it, it does have many attributes in common with nation states. For starters, it’s got a population that’s bigger than that of India, and its 2016 revenue wasn’t too far from Estonia’s GDP. It also has a ‘national ethos’. If America’s philosophy is capitalism, Cuba’s is communism, and Sweden’s is social democracy, Facebook’s is ‘togetherness’, as corny as that may sound.

 Given all of the above, is it really any surprise that Denmark is considering appointing a ‘big tech ambassador’ whose job is to establish and manage the country’s relationship with the world’s most powerful tech companies?

Denmark’s “digital ambassador” is a first. No country has ever created such a role. Their job will be to liase with the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Given the fraught relationship many European countries have with American big-tech – especially on issues of taxation, privacy, and national security – Denmark’s decision to extend an olive branch seems sensible.

Speaking with the Washington Post, Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said, “just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.”….(More)”

Data in public health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Berg in Science: “In 1854, physician John Snow helped curtail a cholera outbreak in a London neighborhood by mapping cases and identifying a central public water pump as the potential source. This event is considered by many to represent the founding of modern epidemiology. Data and analysis play an increasingly important role in public health today. This can be illustrated by examining the rise in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), where data from varied sources highlight potential factors while ruling out others, such as childhood vaccines, facilitating wise policy choices…. A collaboration between the research community, a patient advocacy group, and a technology company (www.mss.ng) seeks to sequence the genomes of 10,000 well-phenotyped individuals from families affected by ASD, making the data freely available to researchers. Studies to date have confirmed that the genetics of autism are extremely complicated—a small number of genomic variations are closely associated with ASD, but many other variations have much lower predictive power. More than half of siblings, each of whom has ASD, have different ASD-associated variations. Future studies, facilitated by an open data approach, will no doubt help advance our understanding of this complex disorder….

A new data collection strategy was reported in 2013 to examine contagious diseases across the United States, including the impact of vaccines. Researchers digitized all available city and state notifiable disease data from 1888 to 2011, mostly from hard-copy sources. Information corresponding to nearly 88 million cases has been stored in a database that is open to interested parties without restriction (www.tycho.pitt.edu). Analyses of these data revealed that vaccine development and systematic vaccination programs have led to dramatic reductions in the number of cases. Overall, it is estimated that ∼100 million cases of serious childhood diseases have been prevented through these vaccination programs.

These examples illustrate how data collection and sharing through publication and other innovative means can drive research progress on major public health challenges. Such evidence, particularly on large populations, can help researchers and policy-makers move beyond anecdotes—which can be personally compelling, but often misleading—for the good of individuals and society….(More)”