[tablespoon]

> The government signed hundreds of separate collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions... Arguably it's partially a failure on the government's part not to negotiate a standard set of pay practices.

Honestly, I doubt the fault lies with unions. Did their previous pay system handle this? Don't private sector companies handle lots of different union rules? Doesn't stuff like SAP handle far more complicated legal and accounting rules across many many nations?

My guess is what really happened is they cheaped out given their requirements and/or adopted too-aggressive deadlines, and the failure proceeded from there.

> Because of this complexity, the software handling it is full of bugs.

The world is complicated. It's hella backwards to expect it to twist to conform to what would be simple to implement in software.