Understanding E

Examples of wired public administration: 
challenges, problems and dilemmas
Introduction
As has been argued above, this book pays attention to the use of ICTs in and
around public administration in a specific and particular way. One could ask the
question whether this is needed. Aren’t there enough fine textbooks out there
completely devoted to applications of ICTs? Yes there are. Nevertheless, it can be
argued that existing textbooks do not pay enough attention to either properties or
characteristics of ICTs, to the various uses of technology, or to the socio-political
and institutional contexts in which smart machines are implemented and yield
effects. In order to illustrate the need for this book some examples of implemen-
tations of ICTs in and around public administrations are presented below. They
include questions and dilemmas that, until now, have remained unsolved.
Levying of taxes: transparency versus law enforcement
Internationally, national and federal tax agencies have championed the race for
the most successful ‘wired’ government services. For example, in 2004 the US
Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was cited as most reliable government website,
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and throughout the world tax agencies are seen as frontrunners of efficient,
responsive and customer-oriented government agencies. Many agencies have not
only reorganized their internal structures and information systems, but also
redesigned the ways in which they communicate with the outside world. Contacts
with citizens now take place using advanced, customer-friendly websites, while
government agencies are cooperating more and more for the purpose of cross-
checking citizens’ data and fighting fraud. For citizens, this implies that the
processes of requesting rebates and submitting personal information has been
simplified, and there is less need to submit information that has already been
supplied to tax agencies. Furthermore, through websites, tax agencies are able to
offer customized information about tax laws, regulations and so on. The Dutch
Tax Agency, for example, claims that all the background dossiers and materials
that a professional tax inspector needs are online and available to citizens. 
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Introduction

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In short, one could conclude that tax agencies have, over the past years, embraced
ICTs and that these ICTs have yielded organizational transparency, customer
orientation and efficiency.
There is, however, a limit to the technologically enabled customer orientation
of tax agencies. In the past some tax agencies (for example, the Dutch
Belastingdienst) have experimented with personalized web services, with which
individual taxpayers could monitor the progress and status of tax filings.
Comparable ‘track and trace’ services exist on almost every e-commerce applica-
tion (for instance, e-banking services) and at first sight they appear desirable for
tax agencies since they would be conducive to transparency and personalized
customer orientation. This ignores the ‘involuntary services’ and enforcement
role that tax agencies also provide. They are public service organizations as well
as law enforcement agencies and the balancing of these functions provides a
compelling argument against the use of ‘track and trace’ services. In their role of
law enforcement agency, tax agencies try to maximize the citizen’s perceived
chance of being caught while trying to submit forged income figures or other
kinds of information. A fully personalized service would reveal the actual checks
and countermeasures available to tax agencies to fight fraud. Such a service could
entice citizens to maximize calculative behaviour, which is of course not in the
direct interest of tax agencies. This provides an example of the importance of how
the specific context of ICT application shapes and interacts with the way that
ICTs are implemented.