Undisputedly, automation of government processes yields a lot of benefits for the “automating” organization and citizens alike, but how do citizens, who formerly were an active part of a manual process, perceive and react to their process being “automated away”?

This paper address the question for the (Norwegian) tax return process, which has been heavily automated “based on a complex system involving employers, banks, social services, and citizens.” Even though all of the above provide “information for the automatic calculation of personal tax[, ...] citizens are still required to do some [residual] work reporting personal information and, in some cases, providing documentation.”

By co-listening to citizens’ questions to the tax authorities’ call center, the authors identified the following four automation impacts on citizens’ tasks: (1) old tasks are made redundant through automation; (2) some old tasks (“residual”) still have to be carried out manually by the citizen; (3) new tasks are created inside the automated process (for example, a citizen has to override default values in the system); and (4) genuinely new tasks exist outside the automated process, for example, finding out what needs to be handled manually or checking which third party accessed one’s tax data (a special Norwegian situation).

Besides this finding, the paper is ripe with useful additional findings and characterizations of automation undertakings. For instance, on a meta-level Impact 4 is related to the fact that users must learn the system’s knowledge representation, even if it is hidden by a good interface, or else they will not fully understand the effect of their changes. And often residual tasks are fragmented and incoherent, thereby increasing the difficulties of comprehending the system.

I unconditionally recommend this paper to everyone working in the process automation domain because (almost) all findings may be trivially generalized to any process automation project also far outside the governmental domain.