Why Free Government Progams Cost Recipients So Much

• Through a population register, online Estonian voter registration requires minimal paperwork from the government and voters.
• Submitted entirely by employers, Japanese workers need not file income taxes.
• Covering all citizens, Taiwan’s mandatory single-payer universal healthcare system eliminates most paperwork.

However, in the United States, we fill in many more forms.

Paperwork Reduction

Aware of the burden, Congress passed the first Paperwork Reduction Act in 1980.

It has not quite worked out.

Costly Government Paperwork

Recently, The Atlantic detailed the state paperwork burden. The article began with a Utah single mother of three kids. Because her $450-a-week income was less than she needed to cover her monthly $1550 rent, electricity, food, childcare, and gasoline, she applied for Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps) and cash assistance. Still though, she needed food bank assistance.

To receive benefits, she had gargantuan paperwork. Almost weekly, she had to submit data and then each month, could have had to re-enroll. Without a computer, the task took many hours. After her employer shut down, it got even more complicated when she had to prove she had a new job because the state thought she had two.

More than 100 times, she said she was eliminated from the programs and then reinstated because of her errors and state glitches.

Then, saying it was avoiding benefits fraud, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act added proving that you are working or volunteering. Taking each program participant close to two hours, for all recipients combined, the task could require a total of 552 million hours.

You can see where this is going. Yes, the numbers are all estimates that are impossible to confirm. But we do know that federal and state paperwork is massive.

Our Bottom Line: Cost

Economists tell us that the cost of a good or a service is much more than the dollars or euros or yen we spend. Defined as sacrifice, the cost of an item is whatever we give up to secure it. Consequently, the time we spend to fill out forms is their cost.

At an incalculable cost, according to recent tallies, Americans spend a whopping 11.6 billion hours filling out federal compliance forms.

My sources and more: The Atlantic’s time tax article inspired today’s post. Then, for much more, you might move on to Annie Lowrey’s book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time–and How to Fix It.  Meanwhile, 2017 congressional testimony looked at the Paperwork Reduction Act. And finally, more up-to-date, this Fortune article talks about federal forms.