A majority of citizens and businesses are willing to use the Internet to interact with government at all levels, according to a new study.
The study, "Benchmarking the eGovernment Revolution: Year 2000 Report on Citizen and Business Demand," was released Wednesday in Washington. It was based on a survey of 303 citizens and 103 businesses who had accessed the Internet within the last 30 days.
"We were surprised at the number of e-government transactions," said Jim Dodd, president and chief executive officer of NIC, an Overland Park, Kan. provider of e-commerce solutions. NIC sponsored the study. "The data suggests that e-government is growing more explosively than we thought."
The poll, conducted by an independent research firm, also asked what services citizens would like to see on the Internet. Citizens and businesses were split on the level of government with which they would prefer to interact. Forty-one percent of citizens said they would prefer to deal with their local government, while 42 percent of businesses were more interested in visiting federal sites.
Many citizens said they favored online voting and were interested in using state and local services, such as renewing drivers licenses, on the Internet. Meanwhile, almost half of all businesses said they wanted to search federal or municipal court records on the Web while 43 percent wanted to conduct transactions related to professional licenses online. Thirty-six percent of businesses wanted to use the Web to apply for business permits.
Sixty-one percent of citizens and 71 percent of businesses said they would prefer to pay convenience or user fees for online services rather than having tax dollars earmarked to provide such services.
More than half of businesses and citizens prefer to do business with the government via a central Internet site and pegged convenience as the main benefit of e-government.
Nevertheless, only 35 percent of those polled who already use Internet e-commerce sites felt confident that the government would keep their records confidential. Those who did not engage in e-commerce are even more wary.