How ICT can serve legislation and law interpretation

In order to take greater simplification steps, the imaginative possibilities that have been - and can be - developed within the ICT world must be explored and utilised. This applies not only to the implementation of tax legislation, but also to its creation. It mainly concerns the development of digital tools that can guide taxpayers more easily through the tax system. Naturally, this digitisation can also prove useful for the administration of justice. This does, however, require that legislative lawyers and ICT specialists be prepared to think 'out of the box' and to abandon some ingrained structures of thought. It is important to have the courage to recognise that the existing and familiar legislative and implementation techniques are insufficiently capable of organising and utilising the abundance of data in such a way as to deliver the desired process-related qualitative added value. The traditional frameworks of legislative practice have gradually reached their limits.

Existing and forthcoming ICT capabilities can be of great service to the process of legislation and law interpretation. They can act as a helping hand, but in order to be truly successful, they should not be a coercive fist. Automation and digitisation will, as is necessary in all technological progress processes, have to be firmly embedded in our ethical, constitutional and social structures.

At the VHMF symposium "Future supervision: Mariëtte Lokin gave an example of this innovative thinking by presenting the legislator as a system manager. It is necessary to translate the statutory rules into specifications in the form of decision and calculation rules, into data specifications and ultimately into software codes on the basis of which ICT systems can take automated decisions as well as provide advice and information. This is currently still a complex and time-consuming process. It is therefore necessary to explore the development possibilities and to invest in innovative "techniques" to ensure that legislation continues to come into its own (literally) in an ICT-driven environment.

In this article, we aim to investigate how ICT developments can serve large-scale processes, such as taxation or the granting of income-related benefits, and at the same time add value to the rule of law in the administration of justice. To this end, we will explore the backgrounds and provide an analysis of the causes underlying the generally prevailing view that the application of ICT is too one-sidedly focused on the efficiency of the implementation processes. We will explore opportunities for interdisciplinary cooperation between ICT and tax professionals to contribute to innovative developments in legislation and the application of law that serve the rule of law in government. We focus on the tax domain, but the chosen approach applies equally to the many other policy areas in which the government is involved.