Not true. In routine cases, government paperwork in Finland is largely automated and highly efficient. For example, you get your tax returns prefilled. The Tax Administration calculates many of the deductions on your behalf. For example, when we received rental income from our former home once, the Tax Administration had automatically deduced my wife's student loan interest payments from her part of the income. We'd probably had forgotten about those had it not been done automatically on her behalf. Unbelievably good service. Pretty much all government services are on the Internet.

I'm sure there are invasive regulations in some sectors but to say that nothing can be done without intensive and slow paperwork is clearly mistaken.