The Root of Transactional Complexity in Government Transactions

Now, what I've described in my previous post is the reality in private
companies. It is easy to understand why purely automating market facing
processes could be most difficult--too many products, too many
competition, to broad a market.

But now, we need to ask ourselves whether these conditions are true of
government. Are they? They do not have competition, their products are
very specific, and they have a captured market.

They say that legislation makes it difficult to automate processes. The
fact is the only unit that could warrant such a claim is the Internal
Revenue Service. But even the BIR's level of complexity can be
controlled since both they and taxpayers are controlled and governed by
laws--there should not be too much of a flexibility here, and by
flexibility, I mean opportunities that encourage corruption.

Customs units say that their requirements are unique since they could
not determine what exactly will come in. This is hogwash since
manifests are completed even before packages leave their ports of origin
and can be immediately forwarded to the port of destination in advance.
When we get to the bottom of things, what can and cannot be brought into
the country, and how it is supposed to be brought has been clearly
defined, the fees and processes are once again governed by laws that
cannot be too flexible. The only reason why they allow their processes
to remain complex is due to the financial gains presented by
mis-declaration, maneuvering, and palm-greasing.

Complexity in processes that govern government activities is not a
result of enforcing legislation by a result of trying to constantly
circumvent it (the principle of simple systems). At the root of
transactional complexity is in the inability to establish the identity
of parties engaged in a transaction. Because of the difficulty of
establishing identity, variability and ambiguity become powerful
implements of corruption. The math is straight forward--unless you
start solving from the point of a constant, you will always end up with
a variable, and variables inhibit accurate measurement. It leads to the
mental argument--"they will never know..."

--
Dennis Reyes, Ph.D.
dennis@dbreyes.com

"Learners prepare for the world for tomorrow."

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