This TED Talk features e-governance expert Anna Pipporal, recorded live at TED Summit 2019.

Almost 30 years ago, my country was facing the need to rebuild everything from scratch.

After years of Soviet occupation, Estonia regained its independence, but we were left with nothing.

No infrastructure, no administration, no legal code, an organizational chaos.

Out of necessity, the state leaders back then had to make some daring choices, the ones that a country could afford.

There was a lot of experimentation and uncertainty,

but also a bit of luck involved, particularly in the fact that we could count on a number of

brilliant visionaries, cryptographers, and engineers. I was just a kid back then. Today, we're

called the most digital society on Earth. I'm from Estonia,

and we've been declaring taxes online since 2001. We've been using digital identity and signature

since 2002. We've been voting online since 2005, and for today, pretty much the whole range of the public

services that you can imagine, education, police, justice, starting a company, applying for

benefits, looking at your health record or challenging a parking ticket. That's everything that is

done online. In fact, it's much easier to

tell you what are the free things we cannot yet do online. We have to show up to pick up our ID

documents, get married or divorced, or sell real estate. That's pretty much it.

So that's why I don't freak out when I'll tell you that every year,

I can't wait to start doing my tax declaration.

Because all I have to do is sit in my couch with a mobile phone,

swipe a few pages with pre-filled data on income and hit submit.

After three minutes and looking at the tax return amount,

it actually feels like a quiet, rewarding experience.

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