Government notifications, such as Health Insurance Fund prescription alerts, Tax and Customs Board tax notices, speed camera fine notices and election information leaflets, are sent to mailboxes on the eesti.ee state website. If a person has linked up their personal email account, notifications are also sent there.

The ministry now wants to upgrade the system to include important documents sent to the Document Delivery Portal (Kättetoimetamisportaal/DDP), such as court summons, so they are harder to avoid.

The new system should reduce paper-based administration and ensure that notifications and documents reach recipients on time, the ministry says.

"At present, the mailbox is visible on the eesti.ee website or in the state mobile application. In the future, we want to display the mailbox in other major portals as well. For example, when visiting the Health Portal, it would also be possible to open the mailbox there and see all notifications sent to a person," explained Marten Jakobson, adviser to the services department at the Ministry of Justice and Digital Affairs.

There are plans to restrict e-services if a person or business does not accept the document sent by the national mailbox. This already happens on the DDP.

But business owners are concerned. Feedback submitted about the proposal by the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry pointed out that if a business lost access to the e-Tax system, for example, it would no longer be able to file declarations or pay taxes.

"Perhaps a company's authorized representative falls ill, or there are technical problems, such as a lack of internet access. An employee may become sick. In such a situation, it would not be reasonable for a company to lose access to very important state e-services," said Marko Udras, head of policy and legal affairs at the chamber.

Jakobson said that the DDP already allows access to services such as the e-Business Register and the public e-File system to be restricted. The Tax and Customs Board can also impose restrictions in its own system when there are tax arrears.

Restrictions will be developed separately by each institution, he added.

"This draft legislation does not create a unified delivery framework. Today, there are more than 80 legal acts and special laws in Estonia that regulate delivery procedures in different fields. Whether it is reasonable, necessary or important to restrict certain access rights comes from those acts and laws," Jakobson said.

Currently, around 75 percent of messages sent by the DDP are accepted by the intended recipients. The new reform wants to make it harder to ignore a court summons or administrative order.

"If you log into portal X and have a deliverable document that has not yet been accepted, it is possible to draw the user's attention to it. However, that does not directly mean any restriction. If a person is using a major portal that is not administered by the institution that sent the document, the person can still proceed past it," Jakobson explained.

At the same time, the official said some letters and documents will continue to go undelivered in the future because the draft legislation does not change the existing methods of document delivery.

In such cases, the state will continue to use alternative solutions, such as registered mail or courier services. As a last resort, notices will also continue to be published in the official publication Ametlikud Teadaanded.

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