“It is key for Switzerland to catch up with other countries when it comes digitalisation“
Why?
Why?
Every process that currently involves reams of paperwork (like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month - yikes) that can be done digitally instead saves the taxpayer or customer money.
And the Swiss do like their money.
Another example, comparing how digital COVID payments in South Korea were a lot simpler and faster than in paperwork-heavy Japan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/in-virus-...
Tax offices are fully digital since at least 10 years. If you file with paper it‘s scanned and destroyed. Your local tax office receives all the documents digitally. Of course this could vary by canton.
It does. Zurich still sends me a thick envelope with the 20 pages and tells me to throw away 90% of it if I do my taxes digitally.
What they send out (and yes, in the canton of Zürich) is two A3 pages (printed on both sides) a form informing you how to extend sending it in and, most ironically, an A4 page informing, why they send out less paperwork
It's right in front of me. So feel free to prove me wrong.
Socialized health care? There's no such thing in Switzerland.
Sure, health insurance is mandatory. No question that it's heavily regulated (i.e. basic insurance can't rule you out or discriminate against you for pre-existing conditions).
But socialized health care? Give me a break.
> like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month
The actual declaration is covered by 4 basic pages. In addition there's a declaration of assets and a couple of helper pages for deductions.
You can download tax declaration software for free (at least in the canton of Zürich) and using it for your declaration takes all of 20 minutes.
It may be a bit more complex if you own real estate, or if some other complexities are involved.
You either don't have a clue or you're massively over-exaggerating for reasons, which elude me.
Most everything being decentralized maybe makes nationwide digitalization slower, but that is crucial aspect of the political system.
It has occured to me though that one thing that makes automation and digitalization of society "affordable" by comparison to human labor is -- skimping on security, building this giant house of insecure fragile IT. If we were to actually pay for reliable secure systems we probably couldn't afford the computers-replace-person-hours version either, not sure where that would leave us.
The USA-ians definitely like their money as much as the Swiss.
Because that is life in Switzerland.
But the fact is you won't be doing that anywhere near as much if the way of doing the errands works against seeing people as if it works for. Defaults matter, a lot.
Busywork and drugery should not be the foundation of social interaction. Period.
Maybe ZH does things better, but I still feel like it's a shame there is not more standardisation. I understand why politically this is difficult though with the independence of the cantons.
It should allow more security, because digital signature is harder to forge than previous physical securities. But also you could use them more easily in other countries, as it can be read by a computer, and not a human that speaks a finite set of languages.
Lastly, you could use them for authentication for various online and daily services, such as banking, taxes, creation of companies, digital signature,... that are said to save time on logistics.
Yet there are countries running 3072-bit RSA on Infineon chips, because their 3K keys are least broken. Discovery also entailed country-wide certificate revocation, which IIRC happened days if not weeks after the flaws were public, while the law states a digital signature has the same bearing as a physical one.