US Federal government agencies have missed multiple deadlines to transition from paper to web-based forms, and a new report has found only a tiny percentage of US government forms are compliant with a law meant to spur digitisation.

The technology for web-based forms has existed since the early days of the Internet. The report by the US Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a technology policy think tank, found that many government forms are not fully compliant with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA), a law passed in 2018 that required agencies to transition from paper forms to accessible, mobile-friendly, web-based forms within two years.

“The statutory deadlines written into 21st Century IDEA have now passed, yet agencies have made disappointingly little progress toward making their forms available in an accessible digital format for both desktop and mobile users, as the law requires,” the report notes.

“Indeed, out of a random sample of 1,348 government forms, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) found that fewer than 2 percent were fully compliant with 21st Century IDEA. While 78 percent were partially compliant, this shows all agencies have more work ahead to fulfill their obligations under the law. There are at least a half dozen steps the federal government should take to accelerate executive agencies’ transition to web-based forms.”

ITIF checked the 15 US executive agencies’ forms to assess their compliance with 21st Century IDEA’s web-based forms requirement. It located these forms using usa.gov/forms, which compiles links to federal government agencies’ forms.

ITIF examined all forms associated with each executive agency, as well as forms associated with sub-agencies and bureaus of each agency, to determine whether they were included on each main agency’s usa.gov forms page. It then randomly selected and assessed 100 forms from each agency; and for agencies that had fewer than 100 forms, assessed the total number of forms.

“Our assessment found that only 2 percent of government forms in our sample are fully compliant as an online form. We also found that 78 percent are partially compliant as a fillable PDF. We did not count forms available as Word documents, Excel files, or non-fillable PDFs as fully or partially compliant since Internet users are not able to easily complete forms in these formats on a web browser.

“Of the forms that are only available as fillable PDFs and request a signature, only 29 percent have a digital signature field in the PDF, meaning most users still need to print the forms in order to sign them. Additionally, mobile users cannot complete forms that are only available as fillable PDFs through mobile web browsers unless they install a third-party app or use a third-party service.

“Given that 21st Century IDEA requires web-based forms to be “fully functional and usable on common mobile devices,” agencies that only make their forms available as fillable PDFs are not fully compliant. In total, of the 1,348 forms tested in our sample, we only identified 24 from all 15 executive agencies that were fully compliant.”

ITIF also notes that the persistence of fax machines in government is a by-product of the federal government’s slowness to modernise and replace paper-based forms.

“Every year, many federal agencies pay government contractors to provide fax services, when this information could almost always be sent just as easily via email. Today, it is possible to securely sign and send documents digitally, and the only reason to hang on to outdated technology such as fax machines is a reluctance to shift to these new technologies that are both more convenient and more cost-effective,”

It wants the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue a directive requiring federal agencies to discontinue their use of fax machines and fully commit to digital means of sharing information.

“Any continued use of fax machines should be documented and the justification for the expense signed off by the head of an agency.”

Other recommendations of the report include:

• Congress should require agencies to report detailed information on their compliance with 21st Century IDEA’s forms requirements.”
• Congress should hold a series of oversight hearings on agencies’ compliance with 21st Century IDEA.
• the federal CIO Council should create a web-based-forms task force to track and expedite compliance, prioritizing forms the general public uses the most.

The full report is available at https://itif.org/publications/2021/08/23/assessing-federal-governments-transition-web-based-forms