Digital ID and Digital Government

30-second overview: In January 2021, a chip-based national ID card that had never been issued cost the Taiwanese government roughly NT$280 million (approximately US$10 million) in compensation. The program, called New eID, was supposed to let 23 million people "handle all affairs with one card." Instead, it was suspended after more than 2,000 scholars signed a petition in opposition. The irony is that in the same year the digital ID program stalled, Taiwan's civic hacker community built a mask availability map in a matter of days — a digital government service that no one was forced to use, yet everyone rushed to use. The real story of Taiwan's digital governance is not about whether the technology is advanced enough, but about how trust is built.

A Card That Sparked a Crisis of Trust

In June 2019, Premier Su Tseng-chang posted a promotional video on Facebook touting the upcoming full rollout of the digital national ID card. He said: "The old saying was 'a scholar never leaves home, yet knows all under heaven.' In the future, it will be 'a scholar never leaves home, yet can handle all affairs under heaven.'" Secretary-General of the Executive Yuan Li Meng-yueh added: "128 countries around the world already use chip-based digital ID cards. Taiwan must catch up and keep pace with global trends." (As reported in The Reporter's 2021 investigative report)

What the Executive Yuan did not expect was not applause, but wave after wave of opposition.

The Taiwan Association for Human Rights and the Open Culture Foundation launched a petition. The Judicial Reform Foundation filed an administrative lawsuit against the government. Academia Sinica held a two-day symposium and subsequently issued a policy white paper recommending a suspension. In November 2020, the Legislative Yuan directly froze NT$400 million of the ID replacement program's budget. On January 21, 2021, Premier Su Tseng-chang made the final call: the digital ID replacement program, with total funding exceeding NT$4.8 billion (including a NT$3.29 billion card manufacturing contract among multiple procurement packages — the overall program budget figures vary depending on the accounting scope¹), was suspended.

📝 Curator's Note
A democratic government spent NT$4.8 billion pushing a program that was ultimately stopped by its own civil society. This is not common globally. In most countries, digital ID programs follow a "government decides, people accept" model. India's Aadhaar system enrolled 1.2 billion people; the controversy has never stopped, but the cards were still issued. Taiwan's New eID remains on the suspension list to this day.

The Cards Were Already Being Printed Before Experts Were Consulted

The failure of this card was not a technical problem — it was a procedural one.

The digital ID program was divided into four procurement contracts: the planning contract was awarded to Giga Management Consulting; the NT$3.29 billion card manufacturing contract went to TECO Electric & Machinery; the system contract, after multiple failed bids, was awarded to Chunghwa Telecom; and the verification contract went to DTC Information. The problem: in early 2020, before any details had been made public, the latter three contracts had already been awarded.

A member of the Ministry of the Interior's working group told The Reporter: "The card manufacturing contract had already been awarded before they came to ask us whether we had any comments on the specifications. The Central Engraving and Printing Plant had already finished its work before we reviewed the overall plan." He added, "Many people felt the task force was just a rubber stamp." (As reported in The Reporter's 2021 investigative report)

Some members later publicly opposed the program; others simply refused to attend subsequent meetings.

This was not Taiwan's first stumble over chip-based ID cards. In 1998, the KMT government pushed a "National Card" program that would have crammed the national ID card, the National Health Insurance card, and fingerprint data all onto a single chip card. That effort died quietly amid protests from scholars and civil society groups. Twenty years later, the problem wore a different face, but the core contradiction had not changed.

"A Digital ID Can Be the Foundation of a Smart Government — or the Infrastructure of an Authoritarian One"

Qiu Wencong, a researcher at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae (Institute of Law) at Academia Sinica, is one of the most important academic voices on Taiwan's digital ID debate. In an interview with Academia Sinica, he explained the root of the problem:

"The biggest issue is the problem of digital footprints. With a paper document, once someone looks at it on the spot, no record is left unless the content is separately transcribed. But in a digital environment, there will always be a usage log. As digital footprints accumulate through our constant use of ID cards in daily life, the worst-case scenario is the emergence of a surveillance mechanism like the social credit scoring system across the strait." (As reported in the Institutum Iurisprudentiae interview)

Lin Yuteng, the lawyer who assisted the Judicial Reform Foundation with its lawsuit, put it more bluntly: "A digital ID card can be the foundation of a smart government, or it can be the infrastructure of an authoritarian government. The difference between good and bad is the importance of an accountability system." (As reported in The Reporter's 2021 investigative report)

📝 Curator's Note
This statement is at the heart of the entire controversy. Taiwan's transition from authoritarianism to democracy took only about 40 years. Sensitivity to the idea that "the state knows your every move" is higher here than in most countries. This is not paranoia: in early 2020, more than 20 million household registration records were found for sale on the dark web, and the Ministry of the Interior denied that the data had come from the government. Qiu Wencong pointed out: "A defining feature of a democratic society is that power changes hands. Even if the current government would not engage in state surveillance, you cannot guarantee that a future politician who advocates for state surveillance will not come to power."

Estonia Did It Right — But Taiwan Learned the Wrong Lessons

When the Ministry of the Interior promoted New eID, the success story it cited most often was Estonia. This Baltic nation of just 1.32 million people has built what the World Bank calls "the world's most successful digital ID system." Ninety-nine percent of government services can be completed online. They even backed up "government data" itself in an offsite location, so that if the country were invaded, the government could continue operating from the cloud.

🔢 By the Numbers

• Estonia: digital ID adoption rate 97%, digital citizen participation ranked #1 globally (UN assessment)
• Taiwan's自然人憑證 (Natural Person Certificate, issued in 2003): up until the suspension, actual usage remained consistently low, concentrated mainly during tax filing season

But Qiu Wencong pointed out that Taiwan learned only the technical surface of Estonia's system, not the institutional muscle underneath. Estonia has dedicated legislation strictly governing the use of ID cards, and more critically — every citizen can at any time query "who, when, and for what purpose accessed my data," and can immediately file a lawsuit if anything looks abnormal. When a massive government data breach occurred in Estonia in 2007, the government publicly acknowledged it within the first hours and reissued national ID numbers across the entire country.

In 2019, after a visit to Estonia, the Ministry of the Interior wrote in its report: "The government should promote this with the most careful, rigorous, and meticulous attitude. Yet when the inevitable slip occurs, the government should have the courage to admit its mistakes." Then it returned to Taiwan and did almost the exact opposite.

The Mask Map: Another Path for Digital Government

The digital ID program stalled, but Taiwan's digital governance is not a wasteland. In fact, what best represents the spirit of Taiwan's digital government is not the top-down New eID, but the bottom-up g0v (零時政府, "Government at Zero Hour") movement.

In February 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Taiwan implemented a mask rationing system under its name-based purchase program, but people had no way of knowing which pharmacies still had masks in stock. Wu Zhanwei, founder of the Tainan Hao Xiang Workshop, built the first prototype of a convenience store mask availability map. Audrey Tang, then a minister without portfolio, saw it, immediately contacted Wu, and within days coordinated the government to release an open API for real-time mask inventory data.

"Tang had decision-making authority and could write code herself, so none of us had to travel north to report to any official. The developers could just focus on developing." — Wu Zhanwei (as reported in TechNews 2020)

More than a thousand civic hackers joined an online hackathon. According to an NPR report², within six days of Wu launching the first version of the map, people across all of Taiwan could check real-time mask inventory at every pharmacy. Developers in South Korea and Japan subsequently followed Taiwan's model, but most concluded that the Taiwan experience was difficult to replicate.

The lesson of this story is not just about technology. The contrast between the digital ID card and the mask map reveals the central paradox of digital government: the government's most successful digital services are often not designed by the government itself.

From Minister Without Portfolio to the Ministry of Digital Affairs

Audrey Tang's role in the mask map was that of a bridge-builder rather than a commander, and this positioning carried over to her next role. On August 27, 2022, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) was officially established, with Tang serving as its inaugural minister (tenure from 2022 to May 2024³; she was succeeded by Huang Yen-nan in May 2024 — all references to Tang in this article refer to her role as inaugural minister). At the inauguration, she noted that "moda" sounds like "motor" in Mandarin, expressing her hope that it would become the engine of Taiwan's digital development.

The establishment of the Ministry of Digital Affairs was itself partly a product of New eID's failure. When the digital ID program was suspended, Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung admitted that "who will be the competent authority for the digital ID card, and whether a new dedicated agency is needed — there is currently no answer." Two years later, the answer arrived: the Ministry of Digital Affairs took over the entire puzzle.

But the challenges remain enormous. A white-hat hacker named Howard (pseudonym), in an interview with The Reporter, pointed to a structural problem: "The fundamental reason is that the personnel handling these contracts don't understand technology, so information security management cannot be properly implemented. Whether in the outsourcing specifications or during acceptance testing, you have no way of verifying whether information security problems exist." In 2019, the Executive Yuan conducted information security audits of 10 government agencies; the overall average score was only 69.3 out of 100, and 6 agencies failed the technical inspection. The number of unfilled dedicated information security positions within the executive branch was as high as 60%, amounting to over 1,000 vacancies. (As reported in The Reporter's 2021 investigative report)

🔢 By the Numbers

• The Investigation Bureau once posted a vacancy for an information security analyst requiring a PhD plus 9 professional skills, with a monthly salary of NT$58,000 (approximately US$1,800)
• In 2019, the Ministry of Civil Service was found to have leaked the personal data of 590,000 public servants
• In 2021, more than 20 million household registration records from Taiwan appeared on the dark web

vTaiwan and the Open Government Experiment

While the digital ID path was blocked, Taiwan has traveled further than most countries on another path — that of "digital democracy."

The vTaiwan platform, launched in 2015, uses an AI tool called Pol.is to enable citizen participation in policymaking. The most well-known case was the 2015 discussion on Uber regulation, in which the government stepped back from the negotiating table and let Uber drivers, taxi drivers, and passengers debate directly on the platform. The consensus that ultimately emerged served as a reference for legislation. According to CrowdLaw statistics, since vTaiwan's launch, more than 80% of discussion cases have been translated into concrete government actions (based on vTaiwan's self-reported figures, compiled in the CrowdLaw case study⁴).

Tang's attitude toward vTaiwan is clear-eyed: "This is not a solution to democracy, but a process for building consensus. The rough consensus reached on vTaiwan can only serve as a reference for policymaking. To bring about change, it still depends on the power of citizen participation." (As reported in The Reporter's open government feature)

This serves as a mirror image of the digital ID lesson: technology itself is not the answer. Technology without trust is dangerous; trust paired with imperfect technology can actually carry you further.

The Lesson Bought for NT$4.8 Billion

After the digital ID program was suspended, the relevant vendors initially sought more than NT$1 billion in compensation. In January 2024, following mediation by the Public Procurement Commission, the final amount was settled at approximately NT$280 million or less⁵. Minister of the Interior Lin Yu-chang admitted that "over NT$200 million is already the best possible outcome."

NT$280 million, plus the equipment and facility costs already spent, bought a chip card that was never issued. But perhaps what it truly bought was a lesson for Taiwanese society about digital governance:

You can build the world's most secure chip, but if the people don't trust you, the card will always be just a piece of plastic.

Estonia spent 30 years building transparency to achieve a 97% digital citizen participation rate. Taiwan's civil society has proven it can build a mask availability map in three days — and it can also stop a NT$4.8 billion government program. Both are muscles of digital democracy.

At the end of his interview with Academia Sinica, Qiu Wencong offered what may be the most precise footnote to this entire story: "You can't just emphasize how wonderful other countries' digitalization is and say we should rush to learn from them, while ignoring the legal and institutional foundations that others painstakingly built to make digitalization possible." (As reported in the Institutum Iurisprudentiae interview)

As of 2026, Taiwan's digital ID card still has no timeline. But every tax filing season, millions of Taiwanese people dutifully plug in their Natural Person Certificate — the one issued back in 2003 — use a card reader, and complete their most frequent digital interaction with the government. That old card was never hit by a crisis of trust, because it never promised too much.

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