How Technology can help with defining and enforcing regulations

1. Regulations and
Technology
Bozhidar Bozhanov

2. Regulations
• What is a regulation?
• Types of regulations
• What is the effect of regulations
• How are regulation enforced
• Good or bad?

3. Technology
Measure the effect
Measure the enforcement levels
Makes enforcement easier and more fair
Makes regulations more business friendly
Introduces new aspects of a regulation

4. Measuring
• Open data
• Has this regulation lead to the desired result?
• Unified enforcement software
• Combined with legal-framework lookup
• => how many unenforced regulations

5. “What should I do?”
• Friendly UI to answer the question:
“I am business of type X, what regulations
apply to me”
• Getting notified on changes in relevant
regulations

6. Fair enforcement
• Randomization of inspections
• Metrics on measures taken
• Recording of inspections
• => reduces corruption

7. Easier enforcement
• Uber in Estonia - complementary app
connected with the tax authority
• Broader interpretation: integrating
information systems for automatic
enforcement/notification

8. The case of Uber
• Taxis (and hotels) have “government-
approved reputation”
• Governments can:
• officially acknowledge / regulate other reputation
schemes
• outsource background checks

9. Open source
• Tech solutions need to be trusted and of
high quality
• Implicit trust is not enough
• All government software has to be open
source
• Otherwise low-level regulatory corruption
will be replaced by tech-related corruption

10. Conclusion
• Regulations are not necessarily bad
• Bad regulations are bad
• Unknown and conflicting regulations are bad
• Poorly enforced regulations are bad
• Technology can fix all of that