Digitize everything, PLEASE
I bought a house in Portugal and it was a nightmare. Endless paperwork, banks that didn’t know what documents to request, multiple visits to Finacas, photocopying documents, and all kinds of bureaucratic slop I had to go through. It turned out our house has 3 different addresses and postcodes (it changed over time and some documents still had legacy addresses). How is that even possible, surely that should be centralized and up to date?!
I guess this is considered normal but it made me wonder just what a drag on the economy this stuff is. How many lawyer fees go to this nonsense? How many judicial disputes are unsolved because of crappy paperwork? Portugal should take a note from e.g. Estonia and digitize everything. Please make a centralized system that just works. This is NOT about needing to be a rich country… if Estonia can do it, so can Portugal. It’s a matter of vision and political willpower. Make it an easy country to live and do business, and maybe things can actually catch up somehow to all the propaganda about Portugal being a startup country. (Lol, all the startups are actually headquartered in Berlin and London.) I want Portugal to thrive and succeed, I consider myself a ‘foreign native’ here now, but I’m saddened by how backwards a lot of things are and how much needs to change if Portugal is to be a leading knowledge economy.
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Comments4
Beige Cascade
May 27, 2025
You people should be utterly buried in paperwork to buy houses everytime you either consider it
Oh no, not the gentrifiers being slightly inconvenienced
Apricot Skywalker
May 27, 2025
Not everyone is a golden visa buyer taking your home.
I have a Portuguese wife and child. I’m not living in a gentrified area. But even if I did, these are market forces and matters of government policy (who promoted Portugal for years as a place to live), and we can still have a discussion about how things can be run better in ways that benefit everyone.
We live in the same country. Foreigners complaining are not just doing it for them, they also want to see Portugal succeed. It’d be nice if Portuguese can live in a well-functioning country so that not so many want to emigrate.
Yellow Coaster
May 27, 2025
A digital signature with a qualified certificate, issued by a certifying authority in a member state, is legally recognized in any European Union country. This is stated on the Portugal’s Ministry of Justice's website. In fact, any security expert will confirm that a qualified electronic signature (QES) is much harder to forge than any signature or stamp on paper.
However, getting a registry office or other state agency in Portugal to accept a digitally signed document is still a lottery: it might be accepted or it might be rejected. Citizens are at the mercy of either a lack of knowledge or peculiar interpretations of the law by different officials.
It has been 10 years since EU Regulation 910/2014 enumerated the requirements that a digital/electronic signature must meet to be considered valid. Any registry office, court, or other state agency should have installed software similar to the "DSS demonstration WebApp" (available on the European Commission's website) that would allow any official to quickly validate the compliance of a digital signature on any document.
More than promoting the adoption of digital signatures, we should be moving towards considering traditional signatures, stamps, and seals on paper as outdated and less reliable authentication methods. How many crimes involving the falsification of signatures and documents could be avoided if the adoption of digital signatures were widespread!
And if public administration sets the example, the rest of society will quickly follow suit. However, we remain in a situation where, despite digital signatures being accessible to any Cartão do Cidadão cardholder for several years, this functionality is still unknown to 99% of the population.
Mário Amorim Lopes, please take action!
Amethyst Bagel
May 27, 2025
Will do! 🫡