Because person hours are expensive (because food is expensive because person hours are expensive because socialized health care is expensive).

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.

> socialized health care is expensive

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.

Taxes? You fill in the form in on your computer and can file it digitally. And if you print it it‘s encoded in a format similar to QR codes.

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.

> 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.

I actually double checked.

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.

You should check your envelope again. If you did your taxes online in the past you don’t even have to snail mail the receipts anymore, they accept digital copies/photographs now.

I only got this the first time after moving here, after that they switched to just sending me the access code.

In backward Wallis, I've been receiving a single folded A3 page for at least 5 years. And since last year, I could even snapshot the substantiating documents with my mobile and attach them to my digital tax form if I wanted to.

Also, person-based systems break down when asked to scale suddenly, because it takes a while to hire and train more people. We already saw this with how quickly even contact tracing systems break down when infections go above a certain point. Depending on economic conditions, there also may not be people to hire; pre-COVID, there were public transport funds in Seattle being unused, because there was not enough drivers to spend the funds on.

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-...

There seems to be plenty of economic incentive for automation in the US without socialized health care.

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.

Tax declaration are the cantons (state) responsibility . Some are further than others. I filled out my first declaration some 14 years ago via a web platform.

Most everything being decentralized maybe makes nationwide digitalization slower, but that is crucial aspect of the political system.

Imagine if you had to print a paper form and mail or deliver it to the local Government for even the simplest of administrative tasks.

Because that is life in Switzerland.

Well yes, but lots of Switzerland is rural, and dropping off paperwork is no more bother than picking up a loaf of bread. Lots of us like seeing our neighbor, who happens to also be our greffe communal.

No one is saying you can't see your neighbor if you don't have errands to run.

Exactly, no one is saying you can't see your neighbor if you don't have errands to run.

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.

I agree that spontaneous interactions are important, but we get spontaneous interactions via density, whether it's tiny but compact towns (walled villages, even) or large cities.

Busywork and drugery should not be the foundation of social interaction. Period.

I extended the deadline for my 2020 tax declaration today (Zurich). I did so by scanning a QR code, entering my email address for the confirmation, and clicking send.

Anecdotal, but in SG I recently had to submit ~20 pages of documentation for a permit. Obviously I don't have a printer so this was annoying in itself. Once I took those printed pages to the Rathaus they just scanned all the documents anyway.

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.

Germany is hardly, if at all, better. For anything related to banking, insurances, taxes, rent, healthcare.. I have tons of papers

The latest European standard for IDs is a credit-card sized of plastic with a chip in it.

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.

> digital signature is harder to forge than previous physical securities

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.

I would still argue that the losses caused by this breach were less than what other countries using a paper-based system see on a regular basis, both due to malicious action as well as the mere overhead of said paper-based system.