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Comment by zeemonkee | Hacker News Reader

> bureaucracy is ten years behind Finland. You still need to visit an office to get anything done instead of doing things over the browser

I found this to be the case when moving to Finland; the amount of bureaucracy needed to get started as a foreigner, even one from the EU, is insane (from a British perspective).

- register with tax office

- register with KELA (you'd think registering as a taxpayer would be sufficent; but no)

- register with the Maistratti (um...)

- register with police station (hey, I've just given my address details to the tax office, KELA, and Maistratti, but let's waste another half a day in a police station in middle of nowhere, Espoo).

But whatever, glad to be doing my part to support the National Bureaucrat Jobs Program.

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Getting started as an EU foreigner in UK:

- HMRC

- Council tax

- NI number

- Local doctor

- Voter registration

Never mind that even doing all that, most companies still don't think you exist because you don't appear on credit checks. Granted, most of these can be done via mail (someone should really introduce the British public service to the interwebs one of these days), the bureaucracy in Berlin is hardly uniquely bad from a British perspective :)

Yeah, and getting hold of the HRMC or any of these bodies over the phone can be very difficult. Apologies for that. I once got hit by a HMRC error and it was impossible for me to reach them to correct it while they fined me. Of course, they didn't admit that it was their error and that I took too long to get back to them...

All good points - from a foreigner's perspective in either country.

I think the key here is not web/non-web but the government in question having an intelligent, joined-up registration system.

In the case of Finland, once I'd registered with the tax office my address and other details should have been registered in the system. KELA would be notified - along with all my income details - and the magistrate and police would have up-to-date records. Done, one visit to one office.

You can also spend too much time optimising a relatively rare use case. Each of those steps require that you fill out a form and mail it off. The exception is registering for an NI number where you actually have to book and show up for an interview. That's it. You'll be prompted to do each when necessary, there's no benefit/penalty for doing each too early/too late.

In contrast to Finland, where each of the cases above require me turning up in person. Had I just needed to mail off a form, it wouldn't be so much an issue.

I 'love' the British voter registration process.

"You can do it online!" say the commercials.

Yes, you can fill in a form online, you're then presented with a PDF that you have to print off, sign, and post back to the local council office. Huh?

There's a very frustrating mix of "concern for privacy" vs "being effective".

All these different agencies have their own databases (with slightly different fields making transfer of data between them a bit tricky) and they're not allowed to communicate apart from a few limited examples.

To get anything done I need to fill out a form, on paper. That same information needs to be filled out across many different forms, to different agencies. It's so bad that sometimes one form asks for the same information (address, date of birth) twice.

I'm not sure how governments could kludge all that data into one big database and protect people from hideous privacy violations that result.

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