What do I mean by “slow government bureaucracy”? When the government must approve something or issue a document and all of the evidence and records the government has means the decision is clear.
For example: someone requests a building permit. There is a list of documents they must submit and credentials for the author of some of these documents are required.
At the instant the permit is submitted, all the documents are complete and all credentials are correct. The decision is clear. Automated software could have checked these things, but the government office does not have this software.
So the permit application sits in a set of paper piles for several months and eventually is approved. Or, worse, a human clerk working for a government office makes an error interpreting the rules and denies the permit, and the appeal mechanism is even slower than the main system!
These kind of things make a civilization much, much less efficient. I have friends that are waiting on visas in a similar scenario. (sure, the fact that they can get visas to compete in the field I work in is not completely in my personal best interests, but the law is the law and they will get their visas…eventually).
They are working less efficiently from a remote campus in india, making it difficult to get anything done, because of a delay issuing their visa renewal. The decision is clear, there’s no ambiguity. This costs my employer $20,000 or so. Small, but this happens for each employee and collectively these impedances make entire nations less efficient.
As a side note, one huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge problem with the USA, despite it (somehow) being the most successful nation on earth in economic and military and cultural power terms, is this problem I describe above is really hard to fix with so many government functions performed by small local and state offices. It’s much harder to build fully automated pipelines when the scale isn’t there.
As somebody who worked in a government bureaucracy, I’ll point out what should be obvious: do you think we chose to use these archaic systems? We were always using old outdated technology because we were starved for money. We would have been delighted to have had a great automated system. But we didn’t so we had to keep using our old system based around paper records.
The same problem is the cause for the long delays. We are given a large workload and nowhere near enough people to handle it. So things move slowly while one person does an amount of work that should have two or three people doing it.
And then the public that doesn’t want to pay for efficient service complains about the inefficiency of underpaid service.
Private businesses are more efficient that public agencies because they can ignore their customers. A private business can set itself up how it thinks is best with no outsiders telling them what to do. And only at the end, as it’s delivering its product, does it tell its customers what the price is they have to pay. But in public agencies, the customers are able to get involved - and people in a mass can be incredibly stupid. They insist on telling the public agency to spend as little as possible and they get predictably bad results. For which they blame the agency as they complain about the poor service.
Take a look, for example, at this page from the Heritage Foundation rating countries by “economic freedom”, one component of which is “regulatory efficiency”.
Some bureaucratic operations are deliberately slow, if they’re in a contested/controversial field, like (in the UK) immigration. Quite often that may apply to local planning decisions (depending on how big a project it is).
Other things are much simpler, especially since they’re done online as far as possible (e.g. we don’t understand the US yardstick of your DMV as a place for "computer says no’ jobsworths, it’s just not like that here, likewise usually for passports). On the other hand, the government’s been developing a “simplified” income support benefit that depends on people doing stuff online, and (surprise, surprise) quite a lot of poor people turn not to have reliable access to the internet, or the relevant skills. There’s often a similar story with trying to get benefit claimants into work.
By repute, an example of a country shifting government services online efficiently is Estonia
I wouldn’t be able to trust such automated software. Until we can generate Commander Data or The Terminator, such software is going to need human oversight to at least make sure the right data is in the right boxes. (It’s not the document that’s important, but the data on the documents, and unless those documents are heavily standardized, the computer cannot always get it right.) I read what you’re saying, and I think of all the ways you could cheat.
Bureaucracy takes a long time because most governments have millions of people to take care of. There aren’t enough government workers (cutbacks), so there’s always going to be a backlog as workers can’t keep up. The actual processing is fast, it’s just that people who are months ahead of you get served fast.
The documents are never complete and correct. They must be checked. Sometimes this requires a field inspection. The permittee complains about that. The paperwork goes back and forth several times.
There is no magic world in which life is reduced to a bunch of checkboxes and numbers. Life is complicated and messy and full of people. People are dumb and illiterate and think they know more than they do and have no idea of what the regulations say and mean. And if they think it’s to their advantage, people lie.
If there are people on one end of the equation, then people are required on the other. I’m also a veteran of government, and as Little Nemo says, taxpayers want perfect, instant service without any cost to themselves. Since that’s impossible, they cut the spending to the minimum and then abuse government for not being perfect and instant. You think software is going to change this? That’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Not only do people lie, but they make mistakes, too. And even when they’re honest and competent, they’re not always consistent. Let’s say, for instance, that a form has a space for a first name and a last name, and an optional space for a middle initial. And now you have someone filling out that form who comes from a culture where the family name comes first, and the personal name comes second. Or a culture where everyone has a single-word name. Or a culture where everyone has two last names. Or where the first name is multiple words, but still one name, distinct from a first name and a middle name. Or where the same is true of the last name. And they’re all filling out these forms that can’t quite accommodate the format of their names, and approximating them the best they can. A human can recognize that Chandrasekhar NOLASTNAME is the same person as NOFIRSTNAME Chandrasekhar, or that Abdul Mohamed might be the same person as Mohamed Abdul, or that Firstname:“Joseph” Lastname:“St. John” is the same as Firstname:“Joseph” Middlename:“St.” Lastname:“John”. A computer will have a harder time of it, especially if the computer’s programmers didn’t anticipate such situations.
The World Bank puts out an annual report called Doing Business that rates 190 countries in terms of how many obstacles caused by business regulations there have. Number 190 in 2019? Somalia.
This is part of it, but some of the slowdown is due to the way bureaucracies process things.
Bureaucracies tend to structure things in terms of transactional efficiency. A form comes in, a form goes out. The person processing the form is judged on how many forms they can process per hour. The problem with this is that bureaucracies will tend toward forms that can be quickly rejected rather than a process that is sensible for people trying to interact with the bureaucracy. If a user has to submit a form seven times because each time they submit it, a minor error is detected, that looks very efficient from a transactional standpoint. The employee processing that form probably only had to spend a few seconds on it each time to identify a reason to reject it, while the poor schmuck filling it out probably spent hours re-preparing it while being pissed the whole time. Critically, any measurement of bureaucratic efficiency that values the time required to conform to the bureaucracy at zero is going to trend toward obtuse inefficiency.
This whole process can spiral into Kafkaesque absurdity if you end up with multiple employees with veto-power over the form who have different conceptions of what constitutes validity.
This isn’t the only way to do things. A user-centric model that assigns each incoming request a “coach” of sorts that helps them navigate the process will score lower on forms-processed-per-hour but likely result in greater overall efficiency. Instead of having to submit a form four times due to clerical errors and then be told actually you need to submit this other form to this other department, the generalist coach can have a quick conversation with the person about what they’re trying to accomplish and get them on the right track much more quickly.
Unless you are the military, good luck for a gov’t bureaucracy getting up-to-date tech. Check what most gov’t entities pay tech staff and compare it to private industry. And what do you get when you are (generally) required to source to the lowest bidder?
In many respects, the public gets what they are willing to pay for. Also, what other folk observed about the gov’t not being able to cherry pick, thereby avoiding the time-consuming, “low-value” cases.
BTW - I’m not sure the OP provided anything other than an assertion that there is an economic cost to bureaucratic delay. In my area of work (SS disability) we are currently debating how quickly certain things can be processed. When you are trying to coordinate hundreds of thousands of “jobs”, getting under 9-12 months can be rocket-fast.
In terms of work visas, the problem is - in part - due to inefficiencies. Insufficient staffing is huge I imagine. But we also lack a meaningful policy re: work visas and immigration. Does everyone truly want more efficient issuance of work visas?
For a limited subset of work visas, USCIS offers Premium Processing for the low, low price of $1,410. However, not for green cards and sometimes they suspend Premium Processing because they feel like it. Also they are required to return the fee if the case is not adjudicated within 15 days, so what often happens is a Request For Evidence on Day 14 for something that wouldn’t normally be needed, etc.
(I will try to post links later from somewhere other than my iPad in the lunchroom at work.)