One of the fun things we get to do here in St. Louis is pay personal property tax for "tangible goods." For most of us, this just means cars (trucks, etc), but it also covers boats, aircraft, and hangars not declared as real estate (?). In order to know what to bill us at the end of the year, the Department of Revenue has us each declare what property we own at the beginning of the year. They gather this information by sending out a form for us to fill in and send back. Yippee.

Included with the form this year was a separate sheet letting us know that we could complete the declaration online. There was even a QR code to scan to get to the page. OK, this might not be so bad. Nice to see government services being made a little easier, a little better. Save on some postage (yes, the return envelope did not have prepaid postage) to boot.

Scanning the QR code took me to the File Personal Property Declaration page at https://stlouiscountymo.gov/st-louis-county-government/county-assessor/file-personal-property-declaration/. So far so good. And then, I read the page....

Anytime someone throws "new" and "easy-to-use" together when describing something that is replacing an existing system, I get worried. And creating a "new online account" for a government service? So many questions. For example, if this is an account on the official St. Louis County website, does this new account replace my existing St. Louis county account that I might use for other services?

Turns out I needn't have worried about that last concern. 

Um, no thanks? 

But of course at this point I had to continue the journey, see where it took me. Maybe it's not as bad as it looks at first glance. I mean, I might have chosen a different domain name to host the service, but governments, especially local government, outsource things all the time. Right? 

Continuing on took me to a login page. No surprise there, since you have to be logged in to the site before you can do anything there. At this point, I have opened up the site on both my laptop and phone, just to compare. Because, as we all know, those two types of platform are different and require separate design and implementation. It looks "fine" on my laptop, not so fine on the phone; the one image on the page is not responsive to the screen size. 

A little detail, you say. But if something this "little" was overlooked....

Now I'm really curious.

It was at this point I decided I was going to use the paper form and use one of my Forever stamps to update my declaration the old fashioned way. And a reminder of how much work is needed to effectively transform the digital delivery of government services.