How much should e-signatures have to cost a country?
post by FlorianH (florian-habermacher) · 2023-11-21T22:45:48.528Z · LW · GW · 1 commentThis is a question post.
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19 bn$ for e-signatures for the Swiss administration? None Answers 1 Sergii None 1 comment
19 bn$ for e-signatures for the Swiss administration?
My gut feeling is, LW is a fine place to ask this - keen to remove if instead it's off topic.
I'm confused reading
The Swiss Confederation has bought a huge package of e-signatures for up to 17 billion Swiss francs.
This is for a 7-year period, with a total of some 120 million signatures & seals of various types (if I understand it correctly):
The basis for this is the calculated number of digital signatures. In the tender, 43 million qualified signatures, 43 million advanced signatures and 32 million electronic seals were calculated across all 3,000 or so points of need and over the entire duration of 7 years.
The article I have this from (German) (EN translation), discusses a few details, incl. difference seals vs. signatures. But I don't fully understand it. In particular, I see nothing that provides me with a true grasp of why anything near 17 bn Swiss francs (19 bn USD) would be a plausible cost for that service for Switzerland's government.
Does anyone have any understanding whether the order of magnitude of the cost really may be a plausibly reasonable upper bound, rather than simply an hugely overpriced service? If so, could you give your two cents? (pun unintended, but now that it's here, the question may be rephrased: why does it, per signature, not have to be only 2 cents or so, but instead many francs?)
I guess mostly irrelevant background: Switzerland has around 9 million citizens.
Answers
A reference could be the cost of Estonian digital services which include e-signatures, and are reasonably efficient:
https://e-estonia.com/e-governance-saves-money-and-working-hours/ "Estonian public sector annual costs for IT systems are 100M Euros in upkeep and 81M Euros in investments"
So in Estonia it's ~1.3B spend for 7y. Switzerland is 7x larger population, and has higher salaries, let's say 2x larger. This puts the cost at 18B Eur.
Putting a cost on each signature does not make sense of course, it's probably just easier for the government to justify the spending this way, rather then discussing specifics of the budget.
↑ comment by Viliam · 2023-11-22T12:33:18.485Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This assumes that the costs scale with population size. I would naively assume that it is mostly fixed costs (developing the software, setting up the central servers).
Replies from: M. Y. Zuo↑ comment by M. Y. Zuo · 2023-11-22T17:22:30.305Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Likely the provider of e-signatures would have to assume some sort of legal liability, hence costs scaling. Maybe even exponentially as they become a bigger and bigger target. But the intelligence and foresight of even the best legal team in the world plateaus.
↑ comment by FlorianH (florian-habermacher) · 2023-11-22T14:30:06.124Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
https://e-estonia.com/e-governance-saves-money-and-working-hours/ "Estonian public sector annual costs for IT systems are 100M Euros in upkeep and 81M Euros in investments"
If I read you correctly, the 100+81M in Estonia is for (i) the ENTIRE gvmt IT system (not just e-signatures) serving (ii) the population. Though I could not read the report in Estonian to verify. Switzerland's is "up to 19 $bn" is specifically for e-signatures, only for within-gvmt exchanges afaik.
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comment by Dagon · 2023-11-22T01:08:12.378Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
At a simple calculation, $19B USD for 118M expected signatures (of different types) is $161 per signature. This contradicts the article which says 1.5 Francs or 2-4 Francs. However, it's also "2 to 17" Billion Francs, depending on actual usage. Still doesn't add up.
I have no clue what's actually included in the price - digitization and indexing/retrieval of documents can cost a lot more than just the identity verification. And legally-binding identity verification ain't cheap in the first place.
It does seem high to me, but I can say that about almost all government spending, for any country for any program.