As you may already know, Blockchain technology extends way beyond Bitcoin. Blockchain’s ease of use, immediate scalability and inability to be hacked is leading to its widespread adoption in every area of life. Let’s look at how public administration can benefit from Blockchain technology. We’ll also address real world applications that are already being tried, instead of simply discussing the theoretical.

Verified Ownership

Blockchain technology secures titles while ensuring they are not transferred without authorization. This technology becomes all the more valuable when you’re dealing with property rights that are often transferred, such as someone selling water rights or mineral rights to investors or oil companies. With Blockchain tracking who owns these rights, the jurisdiction sends the property tax bill for these property rights to the right person instead of the home owner who no longer owns them.

Estonia is integrating Blockchain into its property records to verify ownership as well as track who accesses and changes those documents.

Bookkeeping

Blockchain is used to track the sale of whole or fractions of Bitcoins. It tracks the ownership of the cryptocurrency as it changes hands while maintaining the privacy of the owners. Blockchain’s integration into accounting allows local authorities as well as big business to track each individual purchase and invoice. When each invoice is backed by Blockchain, you don’t accidentally send duplicate invoices, and your vendors cannot use invoice fraud to bribe various officials.

If payments are being made to vendors or individuals using Blockchain, payments clear nearly instantly instead of the recipient having to wait a few days for payments to clear. When implemented across the entire accounting department, Blockchain supports real time accounting of expenditures and income while allowing the public to scrutinizing spending. If you were thinking of earning an online public administration degree, Rutgers Online’s online MPA discusses the application of Blockchain to government accounting.

Asset Management

Asset management is easy to implement with Blockchain. You’ll never again wonder how many trucks the city owns and who owns those servers sitting in storage. Asset management via Blockchain prevents people selling city owned assets for personal profit and ensures that critical assets aren’t lost in the shuffle.

Another real-world application of Blockchain is the tracking of government owned real estate. There have actually been debates as to how many unused buildings and pieces of land the federal, state and local governments own in the United States. In some cases, they’d have to search the records to see if the city owns it, the state owns it, or an investor does. If Blockchain is adopted worldwide, it would eliminate the horror stories of families buying homes the city foreclosed on that were then destroyed by demolition crews that thought the city still owned it or sold a second time to a big investor.

Blockchain is set to completely revolutionize public administration from now on. Blockchain is gradually starting to be implemented in bookkeeping to speed up accounting, streamline payment processing and enable transparency. Asset management of everything from city owned servers to seized property prevents mistakes in the disposition of property while enabling real time accounting of these assets.