Digitize everything, PLEASE

I bought a house in Portugal and it was a nightmare. Endless paperwork, banks that didn’t know what documents to request, multiple visits to Finacas, photocopying documents, and all kinds of bureaucratic slop I had to go through. It turned out our house has 3 different addresses and postcodes (it changed over time and some documents still had legacy addresses). How is that even possible, surely that should be centralized and up to date?!

I guess this is considered normal but it made me wonder just what a drag on the economy this stuff is. How many lawyer fees go to this nonsense? How many judicial disputes are unsolved because of crappy paperwork? Portugal should take a note from e.g. Estonia and digitize everything. Please make a centralized system that just works. This is NOT about needing to be a rich country… if Estonia can do it, so can Portugal. It’s a matter of vision and political willpower. Make it an easy country to live and do business, and maybe things can actually catch up somehow to all the propaganda about Portugal being a startup country. (Lol, all the startups are actually headquartered in Berlin and London.) I want Portugal to thrive and succeed, I consider myself a ‘foreign native’ here now, but I’m saddened by how backwards a lot of things are and how much needs to change if Portugal is to be a leading knowledge economy.