Slashdot Mirror
US Spends $1bn Over a Decade Trying To Digitize Immigration Forms, Just 1 Is Online (washingtonpost.com)
Bruce66423 writes: A government project to digitize immigration forms succeeded in enabling exactly one application to be completed and submitted after 10 years of work because of the botched software and implementation. The Washington Post reports: "This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials."
"We can have the federal government handle X, the Euro's do it, after all!"
Except we don't have a European bureaucracy, we have an American one. There is just about nothing they can get right. Ever. Mass transit, health care, food subsidies, infrastructure, education, you name it: they fuck it up. They are incompetent, brainless boobs. They are trustworthy with nothing. Hand over the immigration budget to the border states and let them handle it.
The contractors are paid for the work they perform. While they're generally scum-sucking shitbags, they have nothing on us (I say this as a USG program manager) on our amazing ability to fuck up everything we touch. By and large, the IT contractors deliver exactly what we tell them to. However, they haven't got a prayer when we re-write the requirements documentation faster than they can decompose it, put in irrational requirements, hold them to draft standards that are dynamically changing, impose an accounting system that's both byzantine and archaic, and subject them to acquisition law that is, I shit you not, so large that the Government Printing Office has given up on trying to print it.
I am, however, very good at ensuring, as a program manager, that none of the failures, delays or overruns can be pinned on me, and as continue to be promoted for my excellence at avoiding any risk of success.
How much would it cost to digitize a 1040 and all the dependent schedules from scratch today? I think that's an apt comparison.
In 2012 a co-worker of mine was assigned to a project to work on his company's bid to be part of this fiasco. They finally decided there was no way they were going to get involved. It's not just a handful of forms. It was dozens of large complex forms with intricate underlying business rules driven by volatile legislation and ICE policy.