Latin America’s startups are beating old and new Covid bureaucracy with legaltech

Contxto – If citizens in Latin America have a government-related issue to address, they have to jump through plenty of bureaucracy. To make matters worse, Covid-19 has put administrative offices in a fix.

Social distancing means people can’t be cramped into waiting rooms as per their usual annoying protocol.

In that sense, officials are sprinting to digitize many processes. Likewise startups are also contributing to cutting down that bureaucratic bloat. 

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Tax attack in Latin America

Pandemic or not, individuals and companies alike must still pay taxes. So Colombian Tributi and Brazilian Dootax are helping users prepare. 

Through Tributi for example, users answer a few questions, submit the requested documents, and then the startup files the taxes on their behalf.

It’s a process that can reportedly be done within two hours. Plus, it saves people the grief of being sanctioned in case something is incorrect because Tributi takes care of everything.

While it only operates in Colombia, the startup aims to launch into Argentina next year.

Dootax for its part automates tax filing for medium and large businesses in Brazil. So, when Covid-19 came around, the B2B startup was flooded with companies that realized their reliance on office staff to file taxes was impractical and needed a touch of automation in their operations.

Startups putting physical bureaucracy away

Then there’s Docket, a Brazilian startup that besides procuring an algorithm to analyze and synthesize real-estate related documents (such as registries), it’s also saving house hunters in-person trips to fetch these papers. 

“The product is a document shopping mall. We connect with city halls, courts, notaries, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the IBAMA [the administrative arm of Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment], and have reduced the time to obtain documents by up to 80 percent,” says Docket co-Founder Pedro Roso.

Meanwhile, another Brazilian startup, MOL, recently acquired an AI startup to automate consumer complaint processing. It’s a win for legal teams who don’t have to deal with those tedious tasks. Similarly, government offices have less requests to go through.

And of course, Covid-19 is also pushing for startups working with electronic signatures to officialize documents. For that they can rely on startups like Legalario and Clicksign.

At the end of the day there is a silver lining to this whole Covid situation. Now more than ever, users are connecting with solutions that compensate for bureaucratic clunkiness. 

Although some tasks will inevitably lead to dealing with government officials. One can only hope they’ve caught startups’ innovation bug so as to continue digitizing and improving their services.

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-ML