The Wrong IDEA

The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA) was passed with the requirement that forms “related to serving the public” become web-based and mobile friendly.  It’s important for the government to keep up with the pace that its citizens are used to transacting with.  During the pandemic, it’s been even more important for agencies to be able to offer alternatives to citizens needing to physically be at a customer service window.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently took a random sample of over 1300 government forms and found that only two percent of them were compliant with IDEA!  That sounds pretty bad, but it should be noted that 78% of the forms examined were at least partially compliant.

The responsibility for getting these forms up and running lies with individual agencies, but the Office of Management and Budget bears some responsibility for the missteps as well.  OMB was supposed to issue guidance to agencies by mid-2019, but that guidance never came.

Regardless of who is at fault here, the agencies with ownership of these forms are still on the hook for making them digital.  In a time where in-person meetings are more difficult to get and best to be avoided anyway, making these forms compliant would be a big step forward in serving constituents.

The ITIF report was not without ideas for remediation.  The group came up with six action items for agencies going forward:

• OMB should issue the guidance it was slated to in 2019.

• OMB should direct agencies to discontinue fax machine use

• Congress should hold oversight hearings

• Congress should require detailed reporting on IDEA adherence

• The federal CIO council should form a task force to accelerate the transition of the most used forms

• Grants should be issued to incentivize agencies’ use of login.gov

We’ve gotten so used to forms being digital in many aspects of life that it can be a bit jarring to see just how many government forms haven’t made the transition.  Most of us haven’t used a fax machine in years, but in spaces like government and healthcare they are commonplace thanks to how secure they are.

Where Extract comes in is with all of the forms that still need to be scanned or are archived, but still contain personally identifiable information.  It’s not just forms that need to be made digital, but the archives as well.  Walkup traffic and constituent inconvenience can be avoided by making records available online.  All of these historical documents can be automatically read by our software for indexing purposes or to find and redact all of the PII.

If you’re interested in learning more, please reach out.