From Physical Presence to Digital Trust

Digital government is frequently presented as a transformation from paper-based administration to digitally mediated public services. Yet in many jurisdictions, digitalisation has not fundamentally displaced the institutional practices of analogue bureaucracy. Citizens may initiate procedures online while still being required to appear physically before a public official, repeatedly demonstrate possession of identity documents, or undergo additional manual verification despite having previously established their identity with an authoritative institution. This paper argues that the persistence of such practices reflects not only technological limitations but also an institutional trust problem. Public authorities routinely rely on physical identity documents as authoritative representations of identity while simultaneously exhibiting reluctance to place equivalent trust in appropriately designed digital credentials. The result is a paradox: institutions may create digital identity infrastructures while continuing to behave as though digital identity requires continuous re-verification. The paper distinguishes identity proofing, authentication, credential verification, authorisation and institutional trust, arguing that these concepts should not be collapsed into a general requirement for physical presence. Contemporary digital identity standards already recognise remote identity proofing and provide mechanisms for establishing high levels of assurance without requiring the applicant and verifier to occupy the same physical location. NIST's current Digital Identity Guidelines explicitly address identity proofing, authentication and federation over networks, while the European Union has developed technical rules for remote onboarding to European Digital Identity Wallets. The paper proposes a conceptual shift from repeated identity verification toward persistent, authoritative and cryptographically verifiable digital credentials. It further argues that digital government should be evaluated not merely by whether a service has an online interface, but by whether the underlying administrative process has been redesigned around digital trust.