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Accountability sinks

(aworkinglibrary.com)
493 points l0b0 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
1. miki123211 ◴[] No.41894267[source]
I experience this pretty often with the newfangled, automated government e-filing systems.

As a screen-reader-using person who cannot use pen and paper without assistance, I was once quite enamored by them, but I've changed my stance a bit.

The thing about pen and paper is that it accepts anything you put in, and it's up to a human to validate whether what you put in makes any sense. Computers aren't like that, if they tell you that the numbers in your application have to match up, you need to lie to the government to make them match up, even if you're a weird edge case where the numbers should, in fact, be slightly off and "inconsistent" with each other.

I called the local govt office responsible for this specific program, and they essentially told me to lie to the government in not so many words. Their system is centrally managed, they have no power of introducing updates to it, they wish they could fix it, but even they aren't empowered to do so.