The New York times


May 20, 1999

Citizens' Electronic Inquiries Get Governments' Attention

By RITA BEAMISH

     Goodbye, phone-menu torment. Adios, disembodied operators taking
     calls in the order received. A revolution in customer service is
     emerging on the government pages of the Web.

     Those daunting Web sites containing volumes of government data,
     images and icons are moving beyond the standard fare of search
     engines, links, forms that can be downloaded and the like. Now
     government officials actually accept questions via e-mail. And,
     more important, they send answers.

     Looking for information on a rare disease? The United States
     Department of Health and Human Services (www.hhs.gov)
     invites inquiries through its healthfinder.gov, which the site
     calls "a free gateway to reliable consumer health and human
     services information."

     Wondering whether a neighbor's drainage will affect your drinking
     water? The Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov)
     has two dozen librarians fielding as many as 1,500 such e-mail
     questions each month, with a typical response time of fewer than
     five days.

     Tax policy questions? The Internal Revenue Service (www.irs.gov)
     awaits your e-mail.

     What about gulf war illnesses or military base closings? The
     Department of Veterans Affairs (www.va.gov)
     and even the Pentagon, with its chock-full site at
     www.defenselink.mil, are churning out e-mail replies.

     "Agencies are learning how to use this tool to answer questions and
     to provide information," said Greg Woods, an Education Department
     official who is chairman of the Government Information Technology
     Services Board, part of Vice President Al Gore's initiative on
     reinventing Government.

     With an estimated 6,000 home pages just for Federal agencies, and
     countless others for state and local governments, the potential for
     e-mail assistance is vast. Of course, most sites have search
     engines that can be used to zero in on information. But for some
     people, search engines are not the best option -- search terms may
     be hard to divine, or the results may be hard to interpret.

     So some consumers wanting information are finding that, though it
     may take a day or it may take weeks, specialists from the
     government are, in some cases, able to give direct answers to
     inquiries, point out material already on their sites or refer
     questioners to other government resources.

     When Lee Bergamini's mother-in-law was moving to Connecticut from
     Florida, he needed to notify Federal pension officials who deposit
     her benefit check in her bank. Bergamini found the Federal
     Technology Service's site at www.usgold.gov
     , which is in the process of publishing online directories of all
     Federal agencies and workers. He found the e-mail address of Jack
     Finley, director for electronic messaging at Federal Technology
     Service.

     Finley was able to furnish Bergamini with the Pension Benefit
     Guarantee Corporation's phone number and mailing and online
     addresses.

     Susan Glickman, a Florida political consultant, got stuck when
     looking for a comprehensive mailing list of state legislators. She
     fired off an e-mail message to the Florida Legislature's site
     (www.leg.state.fl.us)
     , which sent her precise instructions on how to find and download
     it.

     Robert Bickner of Madison, Wis., and Linda Powell of Wilmington,
     Del., both researching family history, sent e-mail inquiries to the
     National Archives and Records Administration (www.nara.gov)
     and received replies telling them how to get the records they
     sought. The National Archives agency expects that half of its
     queries from the public will be by e-mail or fax by 2007, said
     Jennifer Nelson, the Webmaster for the agency.

     Bickner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
     said: "With very little effort, I got the records I have been
     looking for. I was so impressed that I sent a message back and
     said, 'Thank you for putting this very user-friendly feeling on
     things.' "

     Ms. Powell, a bookkeeper, said: "The best part is you're not on
     hold for half an hour. You send it and it's done."

     But before everyone stampedes the government sites, there is
     something of a catch with the e-mail approach: the agencies'
     policies are inconsistent and clearly evolving. Some agencies would
     rather you called their toll-free numbers, or wrote to them, or
     searched the Web site yourself before sending any e-mail queries.
     Yes, many post an e-mail address, but some make it a challenge to
     find it on their sites.

     For instance, the "contact information" button on the Occupational
     Safety and Health Administration home page (www.osha.gov)
     leads to a directive to use the phone, not e-mail, to reach the
     agency in emergencies and to call regional offices for policy or
     regulatory questions. Some hunting turns up a "suggestion box" page
     that solicits comments or ideas but bars inquiries about policy or
     regulatory issues.

     "The ideal Web site is to answer as many questions as possible, so
     the last option is to send an e-mail which requires a person to
     intervene and answer a question," said Rich Kellet, division
     director for Emerging Information Technology Policies at the
     General Services Administration. "e-mail is a difficult issue
     because of the volume and the potential for huge volume. So
     agencies are still working on how to answer those issues."

     In another development related to government information online,
     the Government's National Technical Information Service and
     Northern Light Technology announced a fee-based search engine for
     Federal Government Internet sites and documents on Monday. But the
     Commerce Department has had second thoughts and has decided to make
     the service available without a fee, at least until there is a
     decision on whether charging fees for cross-agency search services
     would conflict with the Clinton Administration's policy on
     unrestricted access to Government information.

     Still, many government agencies are independently struggling with
     ways to provide information and assistance for free, officials
     said.

     Henry Lai, director of General Services' Center for Emerging
     Technologies, which oversees the agency's site at info.gov
     , said his staff generally directed people to the agency's
     information specialists who answer a toll-free number at the
     Federal Information Center. "We don't encourage people to send
     e-mail," Lai said.

     Many agencies, including the Social Security Administration
     (www.ssa.gov), use a "feedback" link. But Social Security's site
     specifies that feedback means comments about the Web site, not
     requests for information. The agency fields 70 million telephone
     calls a year on its 24-hour toll-free lines. Even so, the agency
     manages to respond to 55,000 e-mail messages a year, officials say,
     and its New York regional home page, for one, does invite e-mail
     questions.

     Over at the notoriously sluggish Immigration and Naturalization
     Service, there is a reason why the site www.ins.usdoj.gov
     contains no e-mail addresses. Greg Gagne, a spokesman for the
     agency, said incoming messages "would be astonishing because of the
     huge demand" on a site visited by 430,000 users a month. "What may
     seem quite simple is quite often not so simple, and it takes an
     extraordinary amount of work to answer," Gagne said. Even so, the
     agency plans to revamp its Web site and include e-mail capability
     by the end of the year, he said.

     The welcome mat is already out at the Internal Revenue Service,
     where chatty language and animated cartoon figures throughout the
     site are chipping away at the agency's stodgy image.

     At www.irs.gov
     , the agency promises: "We'll help you cut through the clutter. Now
     just tell us what else you need." Its e-mail flow has grown to a
     projected 300,000 questions this year from 13,000 in 1996, said
     Dave Medeck, national director of the telephone operations
     division. Two hundred revenue agents and audit staff members answer
     the e-mail, handling general policy questions but not individual
     tax cases, Medeck said.

     The mere fact of a personal reply is satisfaction for some who send
     e-mail queries, and actually getting solutions can be empowering.

     Linda Scott-Aughtry contacted a Social Security branch in Baltimore
     by e-mail and was able to resolve a months-old delay in payment of
     her benefits.

     "I quit school when I was in 10th grade," Ms. Scott-Aughtry said.
     "I've been working ever since. For me to go into the computer and
     accomplish that, it really made me feel great."


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