Society often requires the filling out of forms, such as a government compliance form, a tax return, a loan application, or a job application. The government (both state and federal) has thousands of forms that individuals and/or companies are expected to fill out for a specific request or on a regular basis.
A form is a list of questions organized into relevant groups of data fields that a user needs to answer. A form may have a predefined rigid structure to help the repeated filling out and the further processing and may include a field for a signature. Forms may be in paper or electronic format.
Paper forms are often stored, transferred, and processed mostly by manual labor, that is slow and of low efficiency. The paper forms are inflexible, can be understood only via reading lengthy instructions. The instructions often refer to data that is only partially available. The instructions often use language (i.e. in government dialect) that is only partially understandable for the layperson and may not be explained. This may lead to misunderstanding and to an elaborate error-fixing process after the form is completed that necessitates time consuming, additional processing. A common practice is to hire out an expensive specialist who will fill out the forms on behalf of the individual or the company.
An example of a common and complex paper form is the individual tax return (Form 1040). This form contains about 150 fields (without the attachments); but an average user will need to fill out only about 60 of those fields, of which 10 are aggregated fields that could be derived from the already given answers (e.g. subtract line 33 from line 22). The instructions for the tax return comprise 32 pages.
Not all the questions on a form are relevant to the user's situation. The paper forms often have an embedded logic that the user needs to be able to follow in order to make decisions about how to fill out the form. Typically, the more complex the form is, the less fields have to be filled out based on the user's situation. Yet the user needs to process the whole form in order to understand which fields need to be filled out and which fields can be left empty.
The paper forms are independent and do not know about one another. Even if the same identification data (e.g. name and address of the company, phone numbers, tax id, etc.) has to be put into each form, it has to be repeatedly put into each form separately.
The currently available electronic form filling solutions basically implement the paper form structure (e.g. Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat and other Adobe products). The decision about what fields to fill in are still based on the user's following the complicated instructions. The user still needs to go through each field and determine whether the information is needed or not. The identification data for the same user (e.g. name, address, etc.) still needs to be added to each form separately. Though these documents are often called intelligent or smart documents, the intelligence is limited to localized help, error checking, or calculations in certain data fields. The data collected in one form is not accessible to another form.
A Microsoft Word or an Adobe PDF document can be protected by a digital signature. In the usual process of form filling, the user fills out the form, signs the document, and forwards it to the agency requiring the form. Once a document is digitally signed it cannot be converted to a programmatically accessible format from which relevant data can be extracted. The receiving agency cannot use the digitally signed document to extract e.g. statistical data via a program without further manual processing (e.g. printing, scanning, converting, and error checking again). Thus the existing solution (i.e., combining the filling out a form in Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat and signing it digitally) will not produce easily extractable raw data.
Some of the currently available electronic form filling solutions (e.g. tax return generator programs like TurboTax) are able to control the questioning and thus interpret the instructions to help the user. These applications are hard coded as computer programs. If the form is changed, the corresponding program needs to be changed as well. Creating an electronic form involves the writing of a new computer program. These processes are also time consuming and error prone. Yet, a form represents knowledge and it is the nature of the knowledge to change from time to time.
The internet provides a convenient framework for filling out online forms. The current electronic form filling methods (e.g. those provided for the public by the government offices like the Department of Labor, the Patent Office, the Securities and Exchange, or the Internal Revenue Service) are still relegated to manually signed paper documents as the final result. Such paper documents are scanned in as images, but the images are not searchable. Though the paper images can be transformed to text file through OCR scanning, this technology requires a human final check that is still error prone and time consuming. For this reason, because of the missing electronic equivalent of a signed paper document, the paperless office is still not working on the society level.
Consequently, and for the above delineated reasons, there exists a need for a faster, simpler way of filling out forms (both paper and online forms), creating legally binding documents that are completely electronic and not paper-based, and still permit the further processing of the accumulated data.