Improving service delivery for growing towns and growing businesses
Reducing the overhead costs of licensing, compliance, and reporting can help local economies grow faster and can encourage the formation of a municipality’s small business sector.
Introduction
It’s been a long time since most Canadian cities and towns were small enough that their municipal governments knew the local business owners by name. Bureaucracy has scaled in response to growth in municipal size, and with this scaling has come an even larger growth in paperwork and processes. For a business first setting up in (or moving to) a new location, numerous and often lengthy forms have to be filled out to obtain necessary services (e.g. licensing, building permits, land use)—with each form requiring the sharing of similar identity information.
This administrative overhead places pressure not only on smaller businesses—who lack the size to be able to assign such paperwork to administrative staff or lawyers—but also on smaller municipalities, which have often inherited “big city” processes without the tax base necessary to staff them appropriately.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a new push today in the direction of digital service provision. Reducing the overhead costs of licensing, compliance, and reporting can help local economies grow faster and can encourage the formation of a municipality’s small business sector—as well as helping ensure that small businesses grow up to be established businesses that offer stable, long-term employment to residents.
In this white paper, we’ll look at how digital ID can help municipalities deliver business-facing services more effectively and efficiently by accepting pre-verified identity information, and how it can help businesses save both costs and time.
