The Role of Trust in Government Control of Businesses

Governments have the responsibility to control whether businesses are compliant with regulations in various areas such as health, safety, security, tax and customs. Traditionally, this control is exercised in a command-and-control fashion: businesses provide data to the control agencies, and in addition these agencies perform inspections of the businesses. To reduce administrative burden, governments are investigating `horizontal’ governance models, built on the responsibility and participation of companies. The information needs of both companies and agencies are changing and trust is now playing a more prominent role. Appropriate information management, supported by IT systems helps the trust relation to evolve. The model of transitional stages of trust (Lewicki and Bunker) identifies information needs per trust level. In this paper we link ‘horizontal’ governance strategies with the trust levels of lewicki and Bunker to identify information needs. Information needs determine requirements for enterprise information systems and eGovernment applications. We define hypotheses about the trust levels and information needs of ‘horizontal’ governance strategies. The hypotheses are evaluated in a case study of the system-based control approach of Dutch Tax and Customs Administration. We find that system-based control corresponds to knowledge-based trust, and that the information which must be gathered corresponds with both calculus-based and knowledge-based trust

Early requirements engineering for e-customs decision support: Assessing overlap in mental models

Abstract. Developing decision support systems is a complex process. It involves stakeholders with diverging interpretations of the task and domain. In this paper, we propose to use ontology mapping to make a detailed analysis of the overlaps and differences between mental models of stakeholders. The technique is applied to an extensive case study about EU customs regulations. Companies which can demonstrate to be ‘in control ’ of the safety and security in the supply chain, may become ‘Authorized Economic Operator ’ (AEO), and avoid inspections by customs. We focus on a decision support tool, AEO Digiscan, developed to assist companies with an AEO self-assessment. We compared the mental models of customs officials, with mental models of the developers of the tool. The results highlight important differences in the interpretation of the new regulations, which will lead to adaptations of the tool

Continuous auditing and monitoring in municipalities

Tools and techniques for monitoring and auditing continuous streams of data are increasingly being used. However, adoption has only been investigated in the private sector. In this paper we examine the feasibility of continuous auditing and continuous monitoring in the public sector, specifically for municipalities in the Netherlands. A multiple case study is conducted about the opportunities and needs of continuously monitoring and assessing financial data concerning the social domain: care-related and social services, which have recently been decentralized from the national government to the municipal level. Interviews were held with representatives of six municipalities, administrative bodies, and an accounting firm. The research indicates that continuous monitoring is feasible, and that there is a need for continuous monitoring in the public domain. The ease of adoption depends to a large extent on the choice of whether and how a municipality wants to collaborate in offering social domain services

Designing for trust: A case of value-sensitive design

In this paper, we consider the meaning, roles, and uses of trust in the economic and public domain, focusing on the task of designing systems for trust in information technology. We analyze this task by means of a survey of what trust means in the economic and public domain, using the model proposed by Lewicki and Bunker, and using the emerging paradigm of value-sensitive design. We explore the difficulties developers face when designing information technology for trust and show how our analysis in conjunction with existing engineering design methods provides means to address these difficulties. Our main case concerns a concrete problem in the economic domain, namely the transfer of control from customs agencies to companies. Control of individual items is increasingly untenable and is replaced by control on the level of companies aimed at determining whether companies can be trusted to be in control of their business and to be in compliance with applicable regulations. This transfer sets the task for companies to establish this trust by means of information technology systems. We argue that this trust can be achieved by taking into account philosophical analyses of trust and by including both parties in the trust relationship as clients for whom the information technology systems are to be designed.Values and TechnologyTechnology, Policy and Managemen