[beorno]

Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency, then it's possible to actually assign a "bureaucracy/red-tape tax" based on the hours they waste for people using the service.

Without externalizing the cost of all the time wasted, it's just too easy to push time-costs on to the consumers/citizens. It's already a huge problem, and I suspect a major cause of loss of productivity in the western world.

[MonkeyMalarky]

Even with the same amount of work or service provided, under-staffing absolutely consumes and destroys peoples productivity. What an awful waste it is to take the morning off work to go somewhere like the DMV, wait forever in line and see half the service counters empty. Sure, the government saved on some staff salary but society lost more in productivity.

[dpkirchner]

And then those empty counters and slow service are used as evidence that the government is incompetent and should have its budget reduced further. It's a vicious cycle and I am confident the reduced service is a deliberate attempt to undermine confidence in government.

See also: bans on common-sense measures like including sales tax in price tags, making it easier to pay income taxes.

[chongli]

a deliberate attempt to undermine confidence in government

Yes. The strategy is known as "starve the beast" [1] and it is pursued with ferocious determination by its proponents. The goal is to create some kind of minimal government libertarian paradise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

[notch656a]

I thought starve the beast was where non-wartime federal spending as a percent of GDP increased multiple times over the past 100 year period. The beast to be starved being the individual citizen and businesses.

Yes you can see, the beast has been horribly starved.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

[piva00]

Looking at general spending doesn't tell you absolutely anything where the spending is going to and doesn't enable any kind of cost-benefit analysis. It's a meaningless metric to derive any argument from.

Spending on services that are multipliers of productivity is very different than spending on the military, for example. Spending on public services that improves citizens' life like healthcare, parks, schools, culture, easiness of bureaucracy (e.g.: permits for construction, licencing of activities, etc.) is a completely different beast than spending on politicians benefits, military drills, and so on.

[Gud]

To play devils advocate - sometimes the system itself is not just broken, it’s completely wrong! Where I’m from(Sweden) I can’t imagine going to the DMV even for just a second. So asking for better staffing at the service counters at the DMV sounds silly to me

[tablespoon]

> To play devils advocate - sometimes the system itself is not just broken, it’s completely wrong! Where I’m from(Sweden) I can’t imagine going to the DMV even for just a second. So asking for better staffing at the service counters at the DMV sounds silly to me

Do you not have driving tests in Sweden? Does Sweden allow residents to submit any random picture of their choice for their drivers license?

As an American, the only times I have to go to the DMV are when I have renew my license (every 4-5 year), and that seems mainly to take a (simple) vision test and get my photo taken. They also give tests to new drivers and people moving in from out of state.

[piva00]

Any time I had to go to Traffikverket (equivalent to the DMV), Skatteverket (tax agency, your IRS) or Polisen (the police, to get passports or national IDs) which are the only 3 agencies that I had ever to interact with to get pictures collected from, I book an appointment online for a time slot; I show up 10-15 min before my scheduled time and wait for the call for my booking; Go in, talk to someone, take pictures/collect fingerprints and get out.

It's very, very easy.

[tablespoon]

> I show up 10-15 min before my scheduled time and wait for the call for my booking; Go in, talk to someone, take pictures/collect fingerprints and get out.

The last time I personally did license renewal, I waited approximately that long without an appointment, and the place had a line out the door.

[piva00]

Having an appointment at least makes you sure you will get it done around that time and schedule your day around it. Showing up without one makes it impossible to plan for the rest of the day if you are unfortunate to go do it on a bad day, no?

[Gud]

Yes we do! Now that I think about it, the main difference seem to be that in the US, you show up at (appointed?) date and stand in a queue to wait forever while in Sweden we show up at an appointed time.

[tablespoon]

> Yes we do! Now that I think about it, the main difference seem to be that in the US, you show up at (appointed?) date and stand in a queue to wait forever while in Sweden we show up at an appointed time.

That's not something you can generalize about in the US. Here, driver licensing is a state-level function, it's done >50 different ways. It's not even official done by the "DMV" everywhere, but that's what they call in in California, so that's what they call it on TV. Even in my state it's hard to generalize, since they allow contractors to perform almost all the common functions in their businesses.

[joshspankit]

Based on experience I’d say that focusing on the wrong staff-metrics is worse than under-staffing.

For example marking employees by how quickly they “process” someone (aka Handle Time) actually incentivizes employees to not listen, to tell people the wrong information, and to push them to be somebody else’s problem. The customer who might have taken 10min now takes 5 here, 10 there, 20 over there, 20 min of a supervisor’s time, and countless minutes taking up space in the various lines waiting to be told something else.

If a system runs like that it almost doesn’t matter how much staff they have because all those staff feel overworked and overskilled.

[calvinmorrison]

I bet you USAA's Insurance run DMV would be a lot more efficient and have good customer service, but hey, we don't want any Ayn Rands around here

[AyyWS]

I worked for a private company contracted to provide a portion of a public service and later got employed by the the government agency.

- The contractor had no budget. Our servers were out of date and we were running out of date OSes and software. We were all paid below standard and overworked.

- We had a tiny budget at the agency to buy things at the very end of the year. We ran up to date software and OSes, except for a few large complicated systems that were setup with grant money. We were all paid well below standard. I was no longer on call at all times of the day and night.

Contract awards go to the lowest bidder.

[pifm_guy]

But if the lowest bidder has some kind of penalty to pay if average queueing time goes over 15 minutes or random members of the public rate the service provided below 3/5 stars, then they'll do a much better job.

[AyyWS]

We were contracted because the agency lost lawsuits and had to payout and change policies. The contractor was never successfully sued, but I had to compile lawsuit discovery documents 6 times in 2 years.

[feet]

That doesn't exist because those contracts are awarded to friends of politicians. You don't penalize a friend, do you?

[ambicapter]

Why do you think that? Businesses cut staffing just as much as governments do. They already got your money, why would they care about spending more money on you when they know it's a pain in the ass to switch to another "provider"?

[derefr]

Here in British Columbia, Canada, our equivalent of the DMV is run by a Crown Corporation, ICBC. I've never had a problem with the wait times. (Mind you, they generally require you to pre-reserve a general timeslot to come in; so, like a restaurant, they can just say they're full for a given half-hour and push people to coming in earlier/later. That by itself fixes a lot of the issues around wait times.)

[te_chris]

How anyone alive today can think that is beyond me. Everytime I call anything these days I get 3 minutes of disclaimers about why I should use their website or app instead and a pre-recorded sob story about being really busy etc etc just to try and break me before I even get into a queue to be connected to someone. 2022 is a dehumanising time to be alive and just get the most basic shit done.

[colechristensen]

AAA does run some DMVs and the service is considerably better in my experience.

[whafro]

They do this here in Massachusetts, but they aren't full-service. I just bought out my lease, and have to go to a real DMV to process the title.

When you only have to handle the simple stuff, it's much easier to make it a great experience. AAA is basically the EZPass lane for the DMV.

That's not to say that a full-service DMVs shouldn't be significantly better in most cases, though.

[IncRnd]

Why don't we want Ayn Rands around here?

Where I live that's exactly what we have. We have a number of privately owned tag agencies that handle most requests which don't require an in-person visit to the DMV (like a new photo id).

This is fast and takes far less time than visiting the DMV. The various DMVs are bloated beasts with too-large budgets, yet they can't seem to staff people at all their windows.

[nixass]

Waiting for Germany to do this. We'll save few thousand years by doing so

[notch656a]

Where I live private businesses can act as agents of BMV. IT creates an economic incentive for productivity and pleasantness because the customers are not captive to this business and since they are in competition and profit from each license, they try to make the process as efficient as possible. Meanwhile go to an actual BMV and no fucks are given because there is literally no economic incentive to move along nor be nice to you.

[idiotsecant]

A major loss of productivity? I think maybe i've spent an hour at the DMV in the past 10 years. I spend maybe an hour or two each year doing my taxes. I struggle to think of a single other case where my time is consumed with dealing with any kind of bureaucracy. I'm not convinced it's a major problem.

[myroon5]

IRS stated the average American spends 13 hours every year dealing with tax filing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/claim...

[ericmcer]

You probably fall into that group of people who the government loves, just work your W2 job, autopay taxes without feeling the real loss of the money and don't raise any fuss. If you try to start your own business, hire employees or do contract work you will find it is a total nightmare.

[chillchilla]

For every person who spends 2 hours of their year dealing with US bureaucracy there are loads more that spend untold hours. I myself spent almost two days figuring out my taxes because they're just more complicated. And people dealing with unemployment, health insurance via COBRA/medicaid/medicare, food stamps, registering to vote, applying for various licenses, etc. It's ungodly amounts of time when you add it all up.

I AM convinced it's a major problem. Maybe not for white-collar people on Hacker News who have paid sick leave, random leave times and no expectations of certain hours, and high pay. But for many working class people in the US dealing with bureaucratic nonsense IS a big deal.

[IncRnd]

For each hundred million people, your 1-2 hours pear year is 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 hours per year.

[thfuran]

Okay, but increasing state and federal government staffing levels by a few percent to try to save that time would cost more than 100,000,000 hours per year.

[Avamander]

If you want to speed it up with staff, if. The point of the article is that you don't have to waste nearly as much human time at all, if you have a working electronic identity and goverment services.

[thfuran]

Oh, I thought this was under the comment about understaffing, but I see now that it isn't.

[Xeoncross]

It's great when it works right?

Woe to you people off the golden path.

[idiotsecant]

Isn't that true of every system ever?

[Avamander]

An hour or two each year? That's a lot of wasted time. Especially if you add it all up across the country.

[0xffff2]

0.02% (i.e. 0.0002) of your waking hours wasted doing taxes every year? That really seems like a lot?

[Avamander]

Yes, because I spend 10 minutes a year.

[0xffff2]

So what? I waste far more time every year browsing Hacker News than I ever have dealing with government bureaucracy. The difference between 0.02% and 0% is indistinguishable in reality.

[vondur]

Come to here in SoCAl. It's a few hours to get anything done.

[chrisseaton]

> Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency

Isn't there a US law on this? The Paperwork Reduction Act?

[gumby]

Only for the federal government, and as far as I can tell only for "regular people" forms. I.e. if you fill out an NSF proposal or want to drill an oil well or fill out Form D for a stock sale the forms don't seem to include any estimates.

I know the time required to fill out an NSF proposal is "how long is a piece of string" but parts of it (some of the financial portions) are as boilerplate as an IRS tax form.

[chrisseaton]

I don't get what's 'in it' for people to have overly complicated forms. Like they have to store all the data and in some cases manually input it (like customs forms.) What's the benefit?

Ideally people would have a single universal identifier and then I'd never need to put my date of birth or tax number on another form again.

[gumby]

Most likely theory is that they actually want to use the data (or once did, and nobody deletes it because they think somebody else must need it).

In the more general case of data collection I believe people collect data simply because they can. I strongly believe that the PII collected by advertisers and others is mostly never used. A liability they take on with no benefit.