Help People by Doing Their Paperwork Automatically

All levels of government, across nearly every function, require people to go through different processes and fill out different types of paperwork. These can place a significant burden on people who lead busy lives and need to spend their time and energy elsewhere. In many cases these requirements may be a necessary evil — but there are many others in which there are opportunities to eliminate some processes altogether by taking care of things automatically on the government’s end.

An increasing number of governments are realizing that often with the help of technology, they can change their processes to reduce the need for paperwork and simplify people’s lives, sometimes with impacts that can make a big difference.

Case Study: Automatic Clearance of Criminal Records in California, Utah, and Beyond

Roughly one in three Americans has a criminal record. “A criminal record can be a life sentence to poverty, creating barriers to jobs, housing, education, and more,” write my colleagues at Code for America working on automatic record clearance. “These barriers create ripple effects for generations: nearly half of all U.S. children have at least one parent with a criminal record. This reality causes negative consequences for a child’s cognitive development, school performance, and even employment outcomes in adulthood.”

Many states have laws that say that some types of criminal records are eligible for clearance after a certain period of time and/or under certain conditions. Additionally, changes in laws — such as cannabis legalization — have resulted in many people having criminal records for something that is no longer considered a crime, and as such, many states have made those records eligible to be cleared.

But intentions don’t always deliver results. In California, voters approved a ballot measure in 2016 to legalize marijuana and provide a pathway for clearance of old marijuana criminal records. But “the burden was on individual people to navigate a complex, expensive legal process to receive it. This meant that only 3% of eligible people managed to get relief using the ‘petition-based’ record clearance process,” note my colleagues, adding that “marijuana convictions had become eligible to be reduced, dismissed, or sealed — but relief was not guaranteed.”

The team created an online tool to connect people with support for navigating the complex process. This initial tool helped 18,000 people, but “we saw firsthand the inefficiencies and inequities built into the petition-based process, and came to understand that the existing record clearance process simply could not meet people’s real needs or deliver at scale.”

Seeing an opportunity to take a new approach that could successfully deliver at scale, they partnered with five county prosecutors’ offices on a pioneering new technology-enabled approach — identifying and clearing eligible records automatically. This pilot addressed around 85,000 convictions from the records of 70,000 people.

Inspired by this success story, a new law was passed in 2018 requiring all county prosecutors to adopt an automatic approach to the clearance of marijuana records. To help them deliver on this requirement, the Code for America team released a free application that “efficiently identifies eligible convictions from bulk record data — up to 10,000 eligible convictions per minute” and has now helped identify 144,000 records.

This work has evolved into a new approach in which lawmakers pass policies that support automatic record clearance and then government agencies implement them using technology that takes care of the process automatically instead of forcing each person to know that they are eligible, learn how the process works, and go through all the steps manually.

The momentum for automatic record clearance is expanding — and is backed by bipartisan support. In February 2022, my colleagues formed a new partnership with the State of Utah that would automatically clear the eligible convictions of around 500,000 people. Automatic clearance policies also expanded to Oklahoma and Colorado.

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Lawmakers with a range of political views are seeing the value that these policies and technology-enabled processes can deliver improving people’s lives.

Opportunities Abound

The story here isn’t just about the clearance of criminal records. There are all sorts of domains in which government can work automatically behind the scenes to help people avoid manual processes.

One example — put in the spotlight by recent news about the IRS’s upcoming free e-file pilot project — is that over 30 countries have “return-free” tax systems in which the government does people’s tax returns for them and some taxpayers don’t need to take any further action.

Another good application of this philosophy is in automatic renewals, and examples be found everywhere:

• Medicaid: In partnership with some of my colleagues, the State of Minnesota has recently expanded its use of a process in which Medicaid recipients see their benefits renewed if the state government’s data shows that they are eligible, reducing the need for people to fill out more paperwork and the likelihood of a lapse in crucial benefits.
• Library books: When I have books checked out from the DC Public Library and the due date is approaching but I haven’t yet returned the book, they automatically renew the book for me “unless it is a popular title requested by another customer.”
• Fare cards for public transit: A year ago, my Ventra card — used to pay for public transportation in Chicago — was expiring. One day, I got an email saying that they were going to mail me a new card prior to expiration. All I needed to do was confirm whether the address on file (included in the body of the email) was correct or if I wanted the card sent elsewhere.

Regardless of what type of government agency you work for, look to see if there are opportunities for you to take processes that the public has to do manually and instead do them automatically. These provide a real avenue for reducing the time and energy that people spend on paperwork and improving people’s lives in ways both big and small.

Greg is the Associate Director for Human-Centered Government at Code for America, where he is leading efforts to support public servants with resources and training on the organization’s principles and practices for how government can and should serve the public in the digital age.

Images by Code for America