Former GSA Chief Joins Tech Company Pushing Paperless Government

After just a year at a commercial real estate investment firm, former General Services Administration chief Dan Tangherlini is back in the government reform business—this time on the other side, selling the services of a technology startup.

The veteran of the Treasury Department, the District of Columbia government and Washington’s Metro has just opened the Washington office of SeamlessDocs, a New York City-based firm whose specialty is moving government agencies toward paperless forms.

Tangherlini, who was tapped to lead GSA in 2012 to clean up a scandal over lavish spending on training conferences, told Government Executive, “I spent 20 years in government trying to find ways to make it more efficient and effective in dealing with people it serves. So I was really struck by the simplicity and elegance of this technology, and it seemed to me I owed it to the old me to join and try to get this technology implemented. It can really make a big difference in the way services are delivered.”

SeamlessDocs offers a “cloud-based platform that transforms government forms into smarter cloud based versions which can be submitted from any device with eSignatures, payments and attachments, essentially, eliminating the need for paper forms,” the company said in a statement. 

Tangherlini, whose title is president and founder of SeamlessDocs Federal, likens the digitization of government forms to the “third generation” of payment methods, the evolution from cash to credit cards to today’s PayPal, Square and Venmo. “It’s much easier and more elegant to provide documents in a form so that government can return the service,” and it provides the government a real-time database and an ability to assign tasks to respond to the form submitter without the customer having to retype information,” he said. “We think this could be a foundation for government reform processes,” he added.