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School of Business and Management

Too much digital red tape could create a society where rules are broken, a new study suggests

Digital form on a laptop.

Professor Gary Schwarz

Professor in Public Management and Strategy; Director Public Management and Regulation Group (PMRG)

Government efforts to cut cost are driving a move to online services, creating a growth in digital red tape. A new study from the School of Business and Management suggests that efforts are needed to reduce the burden of unnecessary digital red tape to ensure citizens stick to the rules.

“Regulation can be good. We need regulation, for example to protect consumers from harm,” says Professor Gary Schwarz. “But where there is regulation, there can also be over-regulation. Red tape is the term that is used for rules, that are essentially useless.

“Very often it happens that regulation was useful at a certain point, but then the circumstance change, and the regulation is still in place. At this point it becomes an unnecessary compliance burden.”

Professor Schwarz is Director of the Public Management and Regulation Group at Queen Mary University of London. He is also Editor of the International Journal of Public Administration.

The growth in digital red tape

He continues: “In my role as a journal editor I am seeing more and more research on digital governance. Many governments are moving processes online to reduce costs and thinking that this will also reduce red tape. The difficulty is that that this can simply move the burden online, so now we have a new term: digital red tape.”

Professor Schwarz collaborates on several projects that examine digital public governance with Professor Qing Miao, from Zhejiang University, one of the leading universities in China. Working with Dr Hui Yin and Dr Jinhao Huang from Zhejiang University, they have conducted one of the first studies on digital red tape.

Together they have surveyed over a thousand Chinese citizens about their experiences of COVID-19 regulations, which included a requirement to submit personal health information via a smartphone app. This app could be used to gain access to a campus or community, but access could also be lost if a person did not fully comply with regulations.

Their findings have now been published in the journal Public Money & Management.

Unnecessary, ineffective and burdensome

Professor Schwarz explains: “In our study, we broke down the digital red tape construct into three components: the perceived burden, the perceived non-necessity, and the perceived ineffectiveness. We see that if all three are in existence, then this creates dissatisfaction with the regulation. This leads to non-compliance, in other words violations of the regulations.

“This has quite negative consequences for the country because if you establish a routine where people get used to not following the rules, then this could be transferred to other areas of society.

“You want your citizens to comply with regulations on a day-to-day basis. For example, if people stopped following traffic regulations on the road, this would be risky. And when the next crisis comes, whether that’s a pandemic, a war or some environmental catastrophe, if you establish a routine that not following the rules is okay, this is dangerous for society.”

“Our research also showed that the perceived infection risk acts as a moderator; if you think that you are vulnerable to getting sick with COVID-19 then all of a sudden you comply with the rules.

“What happened in China with COVID-19 was that the number of cases became very low, but regardless, they kept the regulations in place. So, for a long time, people needed to comply each day, even when there were no infections, and therefore the burden became far too great.”

How to cut the red tape

Although the research examined COVID-19 regulations, Professor Schwarz says its findings apply to other examples of digital red tape.

“To reduce the burden, digital governance regulation should adopt automatic information collection and processing methods, rather than the manual submission of information. This kind of thing already happens. For example, when we pay our taxes, we do not always have to tell the government how much we have earned, they can deal directly with the employer. This minimises the time and effort required by the citizens to comply with regulations.”

“Digital governance regulation should be discontinued when it is no longer necessary. Governments and other organisations are not very good in discontinuing things. It is easy to come up with a rule, and then the environment changes and the rule becomes useless. But it sometimes takes three years until somebody says, wait a minute, we do not need this rule anymore.”

Professor Schwarz says, governments must communicate clearly with the public about the risks of not following regulations. He adds: “My opinion is that governments will move more and more services online to reduce labour and costs. So, it is safe to say that the amount of digital red tape will only grow unless efforts are made to understand the issues and reduce red tape where possible.”

 

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