Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell

This blog encapsulates the problem of writing government services/software, which often results in strange outcomes.

Writing software for government is essentially the codification of centuries worth of Acts of Parliament.

Now imagine building the HMPO passport system, and then some underlying Law/Act is changed or repealed etc.

Now someone has to find and change everything that the Law/Act affected in all systems.

Now consider that the government frequently outsources this work to expensive consultancies who are motivated to elongate contracts and extract maximum value from the client... And ideally become entrenched.

All whilst building systems of varying quality and inflexibility so that the next time that a Law/Act is changed then this whole process repeats.

There is no central decision making authority to wrangle this problem (there used to be Spend Controls), which is why Government services delivery is so expensive.

Whatever the situation is in the UK, it is not hopeless. The government needs to stop being afraid of hiring actual employees and bring all development in-house.

While renewing a passport is one of the easiest things you can do, I distinctively remember it taking a good half-day (most of which is waiting in line jumping from one desk to another until you find someone that can check all the documents you provided are satisfactory and sign off for you).

Now however, if it's not a renewal but a new application, the difficulty sharply increases.

Often, you'll find that procurement is handled by someone working off of an incomplete set of written specifications. The procurement officer probably has no expertise with or informal knowledge of the problem to identify problems in advance, and even if they do legal requirements (ironically designed to ensure fair and transparent procurement) might force them to disregard informal knowledge over the formal specifications.

After the contract is signed, sunk cost fallacies and optimism biases take over. If the project goes over budget it might be easier to cut back on features than admit failure or demand more money, and the project will go over budget once real users start seeing the in-progress work and change requests pile up. Project managers want to be seen managing a successful project; nobody's rewarded for being the first to predict failure.

This is a kind of principal/agent problem that the private sector partially manages with equity or deferred compensation, but the profit motive has a very limited role in government and you'd probably not want to give stock options anyway. Beyond that, even the political overlords have short time horizons of 'the next election', and announcing a grand new project is almost as good as delivering one.

A high-profile example of this problem is the Canadian federal payroll system (https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/att__e_43045.html), which has led to billions of dollars in fix-ups over a decade or so.

I suspect part of the gap here is, as you note, everything technical is outsourced and so there is not enough institutional capacity to envision and execute what would be a quite revolutionary re-architecture.

I find it extremely frustrating that the government is able to spend tens of millions on contractors for an IT project, but can’t pay market rate for in-house engineers, even if those would be cheaper in the long run.

The private sector also has the option (and usually the motivation) to just quietly disappear failed projects.

Wal-Mart buys an automation system for their distribution centre and it's a huge success? Tell the stock market. The system is a complete failure, we remove it and trash it? Uhhhh of course the secrets of our highly efficient warehouses are commercially confidential, couldn't possibly tell the stock market what we did or did not do.

Unlike in private companies, government employees are often very hard to fire, even if they tragically underperform. If your salary does not depend at all on your performance, you play by the book, follow the rules and don't particularly care about putting in good work. You have no incentives to do so. It doesn't matter how the contractor you picked performs, as long as they can't prove negligence on your part, you're not getting fired. You won't be promoted either, even if they deliver under budget and months before the deadline.

In a private company, the owner wants to make money, so there's an incentive to perform. Underperforming employees (or even entire departments) are simply cut. If a company fails at this too badly (all companies fail to some extend), the entire company underperforms and loses customers. Ultimately, the market ensures that companies grow if they're good at this and shrink if they aren't.

With governments, this is, again, not the case. You aren't going to switch to a competing passport system and drive this one out of the market, no matter how badly it sucks. Metrics won't change much, no matter how bad the UX is, as the system provides a critical service which has no alternative. This is the no competition problem.

Private companies also have more freedom to pick contractors. It's really bad PR for the government if their employees choose contractors through nepotism, so laws have been passed that standardize the contractor selection process. This means that, even if you know a contractor is not the right choice, you may be prevented from doing anything about this. Because al rules can be gamed, most government contracts are won by companies who know how to game the rules, not those who make good software and would be chosen by a knowledgeable employee. This is the no fraud problem.

Most roads will lead back to consultancies stepping-in because the government org will likely lack the skills. And it's very easy for a consultancy to claim they're experts, but throw an army of graduates at it.

Interoperability between rules based systems (and legacy) software need to be considered too. It's a massive problem that will grow with time... Most government departments have some form of every generation of technology.

It's a bit of a race to the bottom regarding outsourcing, there are good companies and there are good technologist's but they never last more than a few years due to poor contracts, poor decision-making and poor pay.

I've actually seen some very good companies deliver on time and under budget, but then the company fails because they did the job too well and follow-up work wasn't needed.

I think that for outsourcing companies "wage theft" and doing just enough to meet the contract are core components of their business. That is, they need to optimise for high fees, low pay and the bare-minimum in quality.

If you're applying for your very first personal ID, then you need to bring a birth certificate and another adult who already has an ID, but it's also something that's been trivial to do for years now.

I'd be cool to have a system that just needs to be fed "patches" in an append only way instead of having to scatter exceptions (if branches) all around.

Some logic programming languages can do that a little bit, but I think that the real problem is that there's no tech debt budget, and lawyers working around the laws can also profit from things being complicated. It'd be cool to have people devoted to simply laws to keep things as simple as possible.