America Wasted $160 Million Trying To Get Afghanistan To Use E-Payments (vice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The country might be home to America's longest-running war, but the US has spent more time, energy, and money trying to rebuild Afghanistan than it has spent killing the Taliban. American taxpayers send billions to Kabul every year and every year billions disappear into the pockets of Afghan government officials. Electronic payment systems would go a long way to solving that problem. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) wanted to do just that. The Agency figured if it could convince those at corruption hotspots, such as customs agents and border guards, to use e-payment methods, then it might curb the amount of cash those agents pocketed every day. Between 2009 and 2017, USAID spent $160 million and partnered American tech companies to set up e-pay in Afghanistan, according to a new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). The goal was to get the border guards trained and using the new methods, with an aim of 75 percent of all customs transactions paid electronically by 2017. As of today, less than one percent of those transactions are electronic, SIGAR reports. And custom officials loathe the system. "It's a very long and inefficient process and that's why people do not use this method," one Afghan custom official told SIGAR agents.

Comments

Re:They sound smarter than us

[apoc.famine]

We fouled up the transition if you only care about speed, and not security. In most of the world, pin+chip is recorded, and then the transaction gets balanced at a later time. It's possible to clone a thousand cards once you know the pin, and then execute multiple transactions against it. Eventually some system will check and it will be declined, but depending on how long it takes to finalize the transaction, you can steal a lot of money. In the US, it checks the balance before completing each transaction. That's what takes so long.
 
So the US is more secure, but it takes longer. I'm not sure that I'm willing to claim we fouled up the transition given that. Since the switch, I've had 0 fraud on my card. I used to get 1-2 fraud instances every year before this. Is that worth an extra 20 seconds at the check-out? I think so.

Re:They sound smarter than us

[Kjella]

We fouled up the transition if you only care about speed, and not security. In most of the world, pin+chip is recorded, and then the transaction gets balanced at a later time. It's possible to clone a thousand cards once you know the pin, and then execute multiple transactions against it. Eventually some system will check and it will be declined, but depending on how long it takes to finalize the transaction, you can steal a lot of money. In the US, it checks the balance before completing each transaction. That's what takes so long.

I don't know where "most of the world" is, but here in Norway at least 99.9% of the terminals and 100% of the ATMs are online doing balance checks and from I've entered my PIN and hit OK to it clears in maybe two seconds. It's long enough that I have to briefly pause before yanking the card out, not long enough that I bring my hand down to wait for the "approved" message. Waiters etc. have wireless terminals that work just as well as the wired ones. I can't imagine twenty seconds unless there's a modem doing dial-up on demand to relay the transaction. The back-end should most definitively answer in a second or less.