The role of trust in government control of businesses

Governments have the responsibility to control whether businesses are compliant with regulations in various areas such as health, safety, security, tax and customs. Traditionally, this control is exercised in a command-and-control fashion: businesses provide data to the control agencies, and in addition these agencies perform inspections of the businesses. To reduce administrative burden, governments are investigating `horizontal’ governance models, built on the responsibility and participation of companies. The information needs of both companies and agencies are changing and trust is now playing a more prominent role. Appropriate information management, supported by IT systems helps the trust relation to evolve. The model of transitional stages of trust (Lewicki and Bunker) identifies information needs per trust level. In this paper we link ‘horizontal’ governance strategies with the trust levels of lewicki and Bunker to identify information needs. Information needs determine requirements for enterprise information systems and eGovernment applications. We define hypotheses about the trust levels and information needs of ‘horizontal’ governance strategies. The hypotheses are evaluated in a case study of the system-based control approach of Dutch Tax and Customs Administration. We find that system-based control corresponds to knowledge-based trust, and that the information which must be gathered corresponds with both calculus-based and knowledge-based trust.