Administrative services in the context of digital reality

The article examines how administrative services are reshaped by a “digital reality” in which legal outcomes are increasingly produced through platforms, registries, and electronic identification tools rather than through purely face-to-face interaction with a public official, with a noticeable shift from document-centred workflows to data-driven procedural pathways. It argues that digitalisation changes the morphology of administrative procedure by elevating the legal validity of electronic documents, the evidentiary value of registry data, the transparency of automated components, and the guaranteed accessibility of services for vulnerable groups, while also intensifying the importance of interoperability and traceable decision-making. The study analyses the legal pillars of the Ukrainian model (the framework law on administrative services, the Diia portal regulations, and the regimes of electronic documents, trust services, personal data, and public electronic registries) and identifies core risks of digital service delivery: algorithmic opacity, accessibility gaps, cybersecurity threats, and an insufficiently clear procedural toolkit for correcting data errors and restoring rights when digital infrastructure fails. It additionally highlights that hybrid access channels, including in-person service centres, function in a digital system not merely as an organisational compromise but as a safeguard of equality and non-discrimination. A comparative perspective shows that Germany, France, the United States, and Poland address similar challenges through different legal and institutional instruments: statutory duties to provide online access, codified rights to communicate electronically with administration, privacy impact assessments within e-government, and legal frameworks for the computerisation of public tasks, coupled with procedural guarantees of review and remedy. The article concludes that the near-term future of digital administrative services in Ukraine will be defined not by the number of services available via digital channels but by a robust “reliability regime” combining identification, data protection, accountability, procedural fairness, and interoperability, especially in light of the EU’s updated digital identity framework and the broader trajectory of cross-border digital trust.