Government by computer

Where better than at the nation’s largest seller of everything to offer all the government paperwork you could want? Gov. Angus King today will unveil at the Bangor Wal-Mart an electronic kiosk said to provide information for more than 150 federal, state and local government services at the touch of a button. Like the merchandise giant that houses it, the kiosk presents product choices most people never knew they needed.

State and federal government agencies have tried for the several years to provide one-stop shopping for their services. At the state level in Maine, various agencies have worked together to provide information on, for instance, employment and job training. (Most local government, for its part, already had one-stop shopping because in many towns there were just a couple of people running things out of one small building anyway.)

Making government services more available to its customers – citizens – is naturally a good idea, but as President Bill Clinton observed about these centers, “there has not been sufficient effort to provide government information by category of information and service – rather than by agency – in a way that meets people’s needs.” In the world of online, supercenter shopping, the government has been offering the equivalent of Bill & Al’s Dry Goods Store.

The kiosk in Bangor, the first in New England but one of thouands planned nationwide, is supposed to solve this problem by offering tax forms, passport applications, child support forms and forms for driver’s licenses, among may others. The kiosks are especially targeted to regions where relatively few people own home computers. And that will be the largest challenge for the National Partnership for Reinventing government, which is sponsoring this program. Though the kiosks are designed to be user-friendly, they still require people to feel comfortable enough around computers to use them, and persuading people who do not use computers at work or home to feel comfortable with the thought of trusting both a computer and the federal government behind the computer will be quite a challenge.

Still, it was inevitable that government services showed up alongside saucepans and T-shirts in malls, where people spend a good deal of their time. And while some might worry that the public kiosks will give an advantage to private business, it is more likely that the store that has convinced small towns all over America to prefer buying at national warehouses rather than local businesses will influence government more than they other way around. The feds might turn to these experts for help.