If the two certainties in life are death and taxes, there’s one other thing you can bank on: being pinged with a fine if you’re a day late paying your taxes. I found that out the hard way a couple of months ago when an email alert about my upcoming GST bill payment deadline slipped into the “updates” folder in my Gmail, never to be seen again.
That cost me $90, which Inland Revenue later refunded, unprompted, because it was a first offence. Every day, Kiwis receive thousands of notifications from government agencies, a barrage of emails, texts and letters, all sent separately and in differing formats.
Wouldn’t it be more convenient to have one place to keep track of what you owe the state – and what it owes you? That will be the primary role of a new all-of-government app that Judith Collins, the Minister for Digitising Government, has been spruiking and which will debut before the year’s end.
Paul James, the government chief digital officer, told me the Govt.nz app will “work well for the less-complex, the more-transactional services” the government provides. You’ll probably still log into the MyIR or MyMSD websites to manage your affairs, but for notifications and payments, a smartphone app for Apple and Android phones will put everything in one place.
Underpinning the app will be a system for verifying your identity and a digital wallet where you can store credentials, such as a digital driver’s licence. It’s aimed at solving the problem that we don’t have one trusted, universal digital-verification system, or at least one that doesn’t rely on Big Tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta.
Rather than create a massive database of citizens’ credentials, a honeypot for malicious hackers, the new system will check credentials held securely on your phone. It could hold digital copies of important documents that are probably buried in the back of your closet.
“We want to credentialise everything – where you live, your educational achievements, your identity, proof of income, your bank account, credentials that come from the public sector and private sector,” says James.
I’ve long advocated a digital driver’s licence, which is now available in four Australian states. But it’s yet to be seen how much appetite there is to embrace the Govt.nz app beyond government. Existing state verification system RealMe set out with similar goals, but has been increasingly sidelined in the digital world.
The government released the NZ Verify app earlier this year, which allows tourists from Australia and the US to use a digital driver’s licence as proof of identification when picking up a rental car.
“The other use case is my young adult children wandering in town with their passports on a Saturday night, proving how old they are to get into pubs. It terrifies me that they’re carrying their passport around,” James says.
When the new app arrives, they’ll be able to verify their identity and age by showing a credential on their smartphone. If this country follows Australia in introducing a social media ban for minors, this tech could enable the age verification required to log onto platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, he says.
The closest thing we currently have to that are the Google and Apple digital wallets where you can stash concert tickets, loyalty schemes and debit and credit cards.
Why didn’t the government just use those systems? Because they are Big Tech and can’t be trusted. But can we trust the government to run a secure system that protects our privacy? That’s still to be tested at scale, but I welcome the aim of streamlining life in the digital realm.
