How many of your agency’s forms are fully digitized? For many, it is at least some. Since the pandemic, municipalities have been making applications for many of their core services available online to constituents. However, these documents tend to be exceptions to the rule; behind the scenes, there’s still a tall stack of papers that underpin manual workflows that drive less-used benefits and important internal processes.
For the most part, agencies have converted core license applications, business registrations, and benefit claim forms that are used by a large percentage of their constituency. However, many smaller-scale programs are still PDF- or paper-based. Then there are the thousands of internal process documents — reimbursement requests, onboarding directives, purchase orders, and the like — that help facilitate operations across all departments.
There’s a simple reason why a good deal of government still runs on paper: to digitize a government form, some with 50+ pages of content with field mapping and conditional routing, has historically been a complex, time consuming endeavor. Even a tech-savvy employee will need several hours to digitally recreate the layout of a single PDF or paper form — and that is before making adjustments to improve readability and organization. If a department still has 100 or more key paper documents waiting to be digitized, that pile isn’t shrinking very fast; most agencies don’t have the human resources to transform PDFs and paper files, even if this conversion was top priority.
One could understand how the staff time and monetary outlays required to transform PDFs into digital gold would cause agencies to limit modernization efforts to the most important form-driven services. However, those remaining paper forms present even greater hidden costs than the funds and labor it would take to digitize them.
An Overflow of PDFs and Paper Across All Departments
For example, many DMVs have empowered drivers to renew vehicle registrations without a trip to the office, saving constituents significant time and headache. But what about the numerous other services they offer that don’t touch as much of their constituent base? If disabled people have to file their placard renewals in person, that results in longer lines and slow manual processing (e.g., driver status verification, payment handling, etc.). Similarly, states that offer incentives for electric vehicle (EV) ownership could approve and deliver those special decals quickly if their forms and processes were digitized.
In HR, departments job applications are commonly 100% digital, but what of the many behind-the-scenes workflows that are the lifeblood of the department? Municipalities are vulnerable to lawsuits and labor board inquiries if their job classifications (duties, compensation, staffing levels, etc.) aren’t fully up to date. Keeping these occupation descriptions current often involves review and correspondence by multiple stakeholders within and outside of HR. Monitoring who has inspected and signed off can cost the staff hours without a central tracking mechanism, especially if two or more individuals are working on different versions of the document unknowingly. The process for formalizing promotions, transfers, terminations, reassignments, and the like — also known as requests for personnel action (RPA) – is similarly complex. With so many parties potentially involved (e.g., recruiters, executive assistants, HR admins, benefits administrators, department managers, etc.), a PDF-based process gets convoluted in a hurry.
The same principle extends beyond the DMV and HR to just about every area of government. Basic child support and WIC benefits might be online, but domestic violence victims seeking an injunction may be forced to locate paper forms that ultimately crawl through a multistage review process. Procurement may conduct its RFPs and RFIs online, but if individual purchase requests must be done manually and contracts are stored in filing cabinets, spending and monitoring funds associated with those agreements is simply too cumbersome.
The Time and Labor Costs of Paper and PDFs
Again, for each of these departments, the paper backlog adds a variety of costs. First, there’s the staff tax. Employees are spending hours on data entry, manual document transport, and other bureaucratic tasks that don’t add significant value. As we have mentioned before, that work has a dollar cost, too; the average expense to manually manage paper documents is about $20 in labor, according to PwC.
Then there is the financial drain that comes with manual processes that are rife with human error, oversights, missteps, and overlaps. It is estimated that each misfiled document costs a company $125, and each lost file costs $350 to $700. Inaccurate verdicts for benefit applications also result in misappropriated funds. Now, these incorrect decisions will also result in hefty penalties under HR1.
Finally, paper-based processes move slower, which ultimately delays getting benefits to the people they are intended for, a significant cost for your constituents. In essence, the services and back-end processes that aren’t digitized yet are costing agencies on several fronts.
AI Scales Digitization Efforts
Fortunately for state and local government, AI is helping to bring mass digitization within their means. We released SimpliAI Forms to enable agencies to convert PDFs into digital forms in minutes without requiring specialized technical expertise — early testing shows an 80% reduction in the time it takes to do so. Program managers, administrators, and department heads can finally whittle down that massive pile of paper forms and bring service delivery and operations up to the highest standards.
Constituents get faster access to more services. Freed from thousands of hours of repetitive, low-value work, employees can focus on exceptions and complex issues that fall within policy gray areas. Agencies execute internal and citizen-facing programs quickly, accurately, and in compliance with regulations.
Once the question was, “Can we afford to digitize our immense backlog of forms?” Now the question is, “Can you afford not to?”
Do you want to see how to turn PDFs into fully functional digital forms in minutes? Request a demo to speak with our team.
