Solving `Passport Application` with Haskell

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.

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.