Pointless Processes in Government Agencies
Translated from Russian with the help of AI. Original: Russian version
The author argues that government bodies and large companies are full of pointless procedures, such as repeated boarding pass checks at airports and redundant ID verification in banks, which cost far more than the risks they address. He calls on the government to tackle this inefficiency, especially given the budget deficit.
Because of my profession, I constantly observe all sorts of useless and unnecessary actions and processes whose value is negative rather than positive, and which have no logic whatsoever.
What is more, this is typical of government bodies, public institutions and large companies.
Bad processes reduce labor productivity, increase costs and lose customers. For large companies, the last of these is critical. For government bodies, what matters is keeping costs down, cutting excess staff and so on.
For example, I am always amazed by the border guards at international departures who check boarding passes right at the entrance. Nowhere else in the world is this done, and I find it hard to understand what problem they are solving. A passenger has already gone through passport control, check-in and boarding control, and clearly does not need yet another formal check, especially since the guards look only at the boarding pass. Boarding takes at least an hour, and hundreds of international flights leave the country every day. Multiply all this by 356 days and by the cost of one border guard's hour, and the result is an enormous sum for the country as a whole.
Or take security screening, where for some reason the officer asks to see the boarding pass as well, even though a colleague standing a meter away, who lets people into the screening area, has just done exactly that. Absurd, wouldn't you agree? When I asked "why?", the officer replied that there is a Government resolution No. 568 (I don't remember the number exactly). Apart from irritated customers, this action achieves nothing.
In many banks, when you submit a payment order, a senior manager comes over to check your ID. Why, is simply a mystery; otherwise, what is the manager there for? No real risks are covered, yet the cost of owning this micro-process is many times greater than the potential losses (I am ready to bet on this with any banker).
Thousands of such examples can be dug up. They create costs and lead to inefficiency, and someone simply has to deal with them.
Often, the growth of such additional unnecessary processes and costs stems from an overreaction to specific risks that have materialized, and they arise less from common sense than from emotion.
At the company level, competition will fix this. At the level of the state, it is possible only if the Government takes care of it. Given the budget deficit, our state definitely needs to fight inefficiency.