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el_oscuro writes:
"In a bizarre twist to the usual failed government IT projects, the Washington Post reports:
Deep in an underground mine in Boyers, Pa., amid 28,000 file cabinets, government workers process the retirement files of federal employees. On paper. By hand. In 2014. This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government both for where it is and for what it does. Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government's own workers. But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
'The need for automation was clear in 1981,' said James W. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan. In a telephone interview this year, Morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: 'After a year, I thought, God, my reputation will be ruined if we don't fix this.'"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @01:25AM
As someone who works at a state retirement system, this article made me feel one hell of a lot better about where I work. At least we do everything on computers.
And I can confirm that it's the damn exceptions, working for multiple state government agencies, or several un-retirements, that the legislature allows people to do, that slows down retirement processing. Oh, and the grandfathering -- we're really running up to five different retirement plans, depending on when someone was hired the first time, and each plan has it's own exceptions....
I've often thought this is why democracies fail -- the attempts by different parties to swing any and all legislation to benefit their own group, leads to so many overlaps and contradictions that the government itself (even if run under low corruption conditions) will inevitably grind to a halt. Then a dictator takes over, and cleans out the cruft from the systems (usually via death camps, sadly).