4 Tips to Issue Permits Faster and Protect Your Municipality from Fraud
When accepting professional engineering documents, municipalities have a responsibility to verify the integrity and authenticity of each document, while also ensuring that related permits are issued in a timely fashion. The advice to just “go digital” is often given to municipalities that want to tackle both issues, but long-term, sustainable change requires more than just a lofty, general goal.
Not sure where to start? Here are 4 simple and actionable tips to help your municipality create and implement streamlined workflows that will accelerate permit processing and prevent fraud.
1 - Make it a Requirement: Vanquish the Dreaded Paperwork Mountains for Good
The advice to save time by digitizing processes is practically a cliché. But some parts of administrative workflows are often overlooked in this discussion. A common trap many organizations fall prey to when digitizing is leaving out the documents they are receiving from regulated professionals or firms.
By strongly encouraging the use of electronic documents like reports or drawings that have been properly authenticated with professional digital signatures, municipalities can accelerate processes across the board, benefiting professionals, firms, and municipal employees alike.
Members of regulated professions belonging to professional associations often have access to professional digital signatures, which enable the creation of authentic and non-repudiable electronic documents. These greatly help to decrease the time and effort required for municipal employees to complete approval work cycles.
2 - Bridging Interdepartmental Gaps: Turn Weeks into Hours
It’s no secret that approval processes can be lengthy, especially when there are numerous stakeholders involved. The time required to transfer a document between departments and to securely share it with external stakeholders can extend timelines, causing headaches for municipal workers, professionals, and firms who expect quick, smooth processes and the ability to complete transactions entirely online.
Whether it’s getting approval for a construction permit, submitting engineering documents for acceptance and archiving, or requesting a budget increase for a municipally-funded project, delays and administrative barriers due to a lack of standardized processes can have real and negative impacts on firms and professionals. Such failures to meet their expectations can turn an otherwise positive interaction sour.
Accepting digitally-signed, compliant, professional documents is a great way to speed up approvals. Original documents can safely circulate between departments and stakeholders without the need for printing or scanning, thus ensuring that professionals have a positive experience throughout their interactions with the municipality.
Municipalities can also take advantage of the time savings and peace of mind that digital signatures can provide. With CertifiO Cloud, administrative officers, staff and clerks can streamline their workflows and do away with the print-sign-scan cycle by leveraging digital signatures for individuals.
3 – Ironclad Fraud Protection: Have Absolute Confidence in the Documents you Approve
Although professional documents such as engineering and architectural plans have long relied on physical seals and signatures, these methods are far from foolproof. In fact, there have been many cases of professional fraud resulting in real consequences for citizens and municipalities.
When accepting professional documents, municipalities bear the responsibility of verifying that they are authentic and compliant to ensure their citizens’ protection. As such, it is of paramount importance to have strong fraud-detection systems in place.
With legally reliable digital signatures, professional fraud is mitigated without the need to manually check each signer’s status on their association registry. In fact, by requiring your providers to sign drawings with professional digital signatures such as CertifiO, you can instantly verify that the professional whose seal appears on the document is the one who signed it by using any free PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat or ConsignO Desktop.
This concept is known as unimpeachable identity. By only accepting documents signed with such legally reliable digital signatures, municipalities can secure the best protection against fraud.
4 - Looking Forward: Ensure the Integrity and Legal Reliability of your Archived Documents
Municipalities bear great responsibility for properly documenting and archiving various processes, from municipal budgets to public works to construction permits. If you digitize your manual processes, it is important to adopt tools that can trace the source of any problems that may arise in the decades to come. This requires having absolute confidence in each document’s integrity and, if necessary, its non-repudiation through time. Not every electronic signature fits these criteria.
However, professional digital signatures such as CertifiO for Professionals have been specifically designed to ensure compliance with legal requirements and preserve the required information in the signed document, guaranteeing their integrity over time and proving that they have not been tampered with or modified in any way.
By opting to require electronic originals signed using a professional digital signature, municipalities can ensure that there is no doubt as to the identity and professional standing of the signer. They can therefore validate documents secure in the knowledge that they meet the authentication standards of the regulators for these industries.