One of the most common gripes about our government is that it’s not efficient. It costs too much to do things that are not done well. One of the main focuses of my policy platform is a focus on legislative responsibility. Specifically this means spending less money and actually improving the service we get by holding these programs accountable. Like the private sector you must achieve your metrics *and* stay on budget. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s how almost every major company from P&G, GE, to Google is run. Mandating that all government programs declare specific success metrics, whether customer satisfaction scores, revenue goals, etc and then reporting quarterly on how they are tracking to this goal, with all of this publicly available on the Internet, will shine a light on what’s working (and what’s not).
An example I’ve used is the IRS. What if they were held accountable based on how painless the process was for customers (us, the taxpayers), and how accurate the results were (fewest errors and money left on the table that should have been collected)? It never made sense to me that employers and financial institutions already send a copy of our tax statements to the government, yet we have to re-enter all this information. Why couldn’t all of this information automatically be filled into a form when I log in? Then based on the information I entered last year (number of dependents claimed, etc), why can’t I be presented with a few questions and then be offered the opportunity to just accept the return as is or make a few minor changes? Well, today the NYTimes asks the same question. As taxpayers, it should be kind of insane to us that TurboTax and the like can all make simple web interfaces asking user-friendly questions, but somehow the IRS can’t do this? This should be unacceptable. Automating this process would allow the IRS to focus their employees on finding tax-cheats and off-shore hideouts, etc (which bring in *more* revenue) and the rest of us would all be a lot more sane since the tax process would be a lot simpler.
To boot, this article also makes a great point. What if we rethought our systems from federal to state level and allowed a company to re-architect it from the ground up? Having a state-of-the-art IT backend to the federal and state governments would be a tremendous competitive advantage for speed and better service for companies. As we wake up to the reality that the US is indeed competing with every other country in the world to house companies, these things will increasingly matter more.
We’ve been engaged in the same pointless “debates” for years. Less government– cut it all! Slash, slash, slash! There are never concrete plans as to how to practically do this. Well, if we’re serious about controlling spending, we should be focused on improving the value we get from every government dollar we spend today. We can drive down costs on what’s working (while making it better) and stop funding the programs that are failing miserably by hiding in the corner. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and it’s time we bring our government spending out into the public eye, objectives, results, and costs all.