Are large organizations in other countries more human friendly? That sounds delightful. My impression from friends in the EU is that it is similar there, at least for housing and healthcare regulations.
Some “nice” bits of government I’ve hit recently in Canada:
When my kid was born I was given a convenient form to fill out that registered my child’s birth, applied for a SIN, applied for the relevant tax breaks, and registered me to be contacted about options for saving for my child’s education.
My city has a nice little online portal where I can see my tax and utility bills, register city maintenance issues, apply for local city programs, etc. It’s pretty decent.
Oh, and the CRA’s NETFILE system is pretty neat. In addition to the expected submitting of taxes online, banks, employers, etc can send documents to netfile which my tax software can automatically retrieve and ingest.
Not saying that any of the above are perfect, but government can (and does sometimes) produce decent systems. Of course, there are always bad parts - I’ve recently had friend and family deal with immigration and death systems that badly need a redesign.
As a dual-citizen, I've had some great experiences at the Swiss Consulate in the US. Though accessing the government through the Department of Foreign Affairs might yield much better service than going directly to the underlying bureaucracy.
Story: when my parents got married, my mother gained Swiss citizenship and they wanted her birth certificate. She told them she didn't have it and that it might not exist anymore, since she was born in South Vietnam, which was no longer a country. They had their colleagues in Vietnam find it for her, and even gave her a copy, without being asked.
For Belgium: The rules are often still a bureaucratic mess, owed in part to the fact that it's easier to slap bandaids on existing systems than design a new system from scratch. The bandaids compound into systems that are often unintuitive, and not always transparent.
I do feel like I benefit greatly from these systems, convoluted though they may be. The goal still is to help people.
The few times I got the short end of the stick, I managed to reach a human the same day.
When my kid was born I was given a convenient form to fill out that registered my child’s birth, applied for a SIN, applied for the relevant tax breaks, and registered me to be contacted about options for saving for my child’s education.
My city has a nice little online portal where I can see my tax and utility bills, register city maintenance issues, apply for local city programs, etc. It’s pretty decent.
Oh, and the CRA’s NETFILE system is pretty neat. In addition to the expected submitting of taxes online, banks, employers, etc can send documents to netfile which my tax software can automatically retrieve and ingest.
Not saying that any of the above are perfect, but government can (and does sometimes) produce decent systems. Of course, there are always bad parts - I’ve recently had friend and family deal with immigration and death systems that badly need a redesign.