Could you tell us a little more about STORK’s activities and what involvement both yourself and the Austrian Government have within the consortium?

Austria has been involved in the preparation regarding the use and development of eID at a European level. On a European level, developments can be seen to have started with the Manchester declaration; where it was agreed that every citizen and business should be enabled with eID that also respects privacy rights. As this developed throughout the years, Europe found that take-up and interoperability were two of the biggest problems in Europe, which is why STORK was initially set up.

Austria was involved in the set up of the STORK project from the beginning, as Austria has a complete infrastructure of eID, which is also reflected in the eGovernment law and the framework as a whole. However, the next and more important step, is to bring that to the user, both within and across the EU member states. It is here that STORK, as a consortium, is contributing to aid the interoperable use of eID, with the guidance of its members, such as the Austria Federal Government.

How would you qualify the success in Austria for various eServices?

Most countries will have a criterion that measures the success of certain projects relating to the amount of money available for a task and efficiency etc. Having said this, we observe that eID has two wings – one that you see, which is the card’s external features and the second, which is internal – the background infrastructure. To be able to deploy eID in a seamless way you need an infrastructure which allows individuals to go to their local community and identify themselves, without having to re-register what they have previously registered at the Tax office.

So one of the most important benefits and successes, which can be noted from implementing eID, is that of the back office infrastructure. Just to give you an idea of that, we have a register of inhabitants, which is the basis for identification. And through the effort of eID, the accuracy of this data has increased tremendously. We did have a difference between the social security data and the data on the register of inhabitants, which amounted to something between 10 and 20%, but that has now decreased to less than half percent. And bearing in mind that any such difference causes a huge amount of effort when you have an actual process – here is the big revenue bonus that you get from having an eID solution. But as you can tell, these benefits are not necessarily seen by the citizen, this has nothing to do with whether the citizen uses their card or not, this benefit is purely based on the way that the infrastructure is built.

Then we look at the successes that are actually seen by the citizens, and in Austria we note that there are two most important applications, which are highlighted as successful. The first one is in the social security area – when you visit a doctor, and when you claim money from the social security system to be paid to the doctor – all these processes are now fully automated through eID, there’s no way around it and this is 100% deployed.

The second application is taxes. Austria has in the range of 70% – 80% of all tax returns being done electronically, and that’s about the most we can achieve, as you will always have a number of people who refuse to do it electronically. Having implemented the eID effort, the tax system has also provided a much quicker turnaround for citizens – previously, from submitting the tax return to effective payment took approximately 7–8 months, but with the new system it’s within 1–2 weeks! So there you see a tangible benefit for the citizens, which is why of course people are really taking it up.

It seems very much like a carrot and stick scenario, in order to get people to start to use these services.

That is the lesson we have learnt – you need some incentive, otherwise you will not attract people. Another incentive is brought through bridging the link between public administration and private sector applications, like banking – an I can happily report that, except for two banks, all the banks in Austria are now accepting the citizen card as a means to do electronic banking.

Has the issue of identity protection been raised amongst the public in terms of these services?

This issue has not only been raised, it has been the primary focus from the beginning, even though it makes the citizen card a lot more complex than it perhaps should be. In Austria, because the privacy and the data protection issue demanded that we had a sectorized approach – for example we have a register of cancer illnesses, a register of convicted criminals – we certainly don’t want these registers to be easily aligned with other registers like that of garbage cans, etc. Therefore we have sectors and data protection and privacy issues, which demand that a system be in place, which through technology does not allow the cross over.

These demands resulted in one-way function and cryptology technology, which is within the concept. That lasted about one and a half years, whilst building the concept you find a way together with the data protection issues.

Out of interest, to what extent is it possible to incorporate foreign eID’s into the Austrian Governments’s eID processes?

Well, in 2004, we issued an eGovernment law, which is an enabling law that provides a holistic eID concept. Also in 2004, we made some provisions for incorporating non-Austrian eID’s. Eventually we will have the citizen list of inhabitants, which is more or less automatically extended with the identities of non-Austrian residents. So if, for example, you come to Austria with any eID card that has a qualified signature, you could use a different card and still be incorporated into the Austrian system – and this holds true for individuals and for businesses. In 2008, we made an amendment to refine this further so that if we want to incorporate a further foreign eID, we just need to do the paperwork, the technology is already done!

What would you say is next on the agenda in the roadmap for rolling out Austria’s eID schemes across the country?

There is one aspect, which I would say has not been reached full satisfaction, and that is take-up by the citizen.

One reason for this is that there are only 1.7 contacts between an individual and the government per year, and another reason is that technology is, for a number of the public, something people are not really keen to take up. So next on the agenda is simplification.

One way to achieve simplification that we already have on our roadmap is to make it so an individual doesn’t have to install any software on their workstation. As long as the person has a card reader, the card can be recognized through the browser and a plug-in appears automatically when a government service is requested. This is not only true for Austrian cards, but also for other cards, as demonstrated with STORK, for example in Belgium and Portugal. And by the end of this year we will start to implement access to European Commission services with National eID’s, and to do that we need this type of access.

The next avenue we are about to go down, which will be in its first steps this year, is moving further away from physical cards. A physical card needs a card reader and what we plan to use is a mobile phone to generate qualified signatures and the eID is linked to these qualified signatures. So by the end of this new development, citizens will be able to use their mobile phone, after registering it in the appropriate way, to electronically sign documents and perform their eID tasks with government and the private sector applications. This is a major avenue we are starting to go down right now.

It always seems to take longer than people think to introduce and gain mass acceptance in the public domain - What kind of time frame do you expect to see around that?

If we separate two things – one is the readiness of the technology, and in this respect I think the services will be ready by the end of this year, however that doesn’t mean we will necessarily see fast take-up, as that takes time to generate awareness.

Most probably it will be about three or five years before this really infiltrates into all the private sector services, until then it will be a minority that is using eID, and that’s not a specific Austrian feature, that’s the same thing we observe throughout the world.

 

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