The Hidden Costs Of Beaurocratic Errors

I'm hoping that this thread might catch the attention of the sections of SANE that periodically sit down with the government and other major entities to discuss mental health policies (@Former-Member , perhaps you could pass the word along?). But I wanted to do this as a thread, as opposed to a private email to SANE, so that the rest of the community here could chime in with their thoughts.

Basically, what I want is to call some meaningful attention to the fact that poor beaurocracy management can have serious mental health impacts upon the community, and these impacts need to be factored in to the decisions that our leaders make about how the beaurocracy functions.

I suspect that, at the moment, these concerns don't factor in to our appraisals of how well the beaurocracy works, nor what changes ought to be made to it in the future. I suspect that our leaders gauge the beaurocracy based on cold economics: "How much does it cost?", "How much data can it process?", "How long are it's delays?", and "Where can we cut down expenses?" And choices are made based upon how much money they will save, with nobody caring about how much grief they will collectively inflict upon the general public.

Over the past couple weeks, my household has been dealing with a pile-on of unrelated beaurocratic problems, and the distress and frustration they have caused us has been significant. I've had to try to reign myself in from panicking, and had restless/sleepless nights, and I've seen how wound up my family members have been, thanks to their own problems.

And although we've been dealing with several differant problems, I can tell you very simply what caused every single one: leaders running their beaurocracy on the cheap!

Some of these significant problems that we've been wrestling with come from beaurocratic errors so basic, you'd hardly believe it. And it just speaks to a slipshod beaurocracy that wants to do things quickly and as cheaply as possible, because a professional beaurocracy would've never let such simple errors snowball into the major grievances they've become. Our leaders hire workers to be speedy and careless, because carelessness is cheaper then dilligence.

Of course, carelessness always ends up costing somebody dearly. But so long as those costs are visted on innocent citizens outside the beaurocracy, they are never factored in to beaurocracy's accounting ledger.

So, as far as the leaders are concerned, cheap, slipshod practices are just a wonderful way of reigning in expenses. No downsides, whatsoever. Give the boss a Rolex for doing such a great job of streamlining the system.

The same attitudes only compound the wronged citizen's grief when they are applied to the call centers. Spend all day waiting on hold for an opperator who gives you confusing misinformation, or who tells you that she can't help you because she's only a basic-level employee, who isn't given the utilities to actually correct the errors in your file.

Why? Once again, because it's cheaper! It's cheaper to pack your call centers with throngs of basic-level employees with limited duties and access. It's cheaper to have the IT dept. design only very basic information software for the opperators to use on their consoles. It's cheaper to use masses of inneffective employees as gatekeepers for a very small team of effective employees who are trustworthy enough to be given meaningful access to the system, and who have the necesary work ethic to actually help people out.

I know that my household's grievances will be resolved properly, eventually. Our positions are so thoroughly backed up by the paperwork that there is no way that things won't ultimately work out in our favor.

But the thing is, once all is said and done, the system will forget about this. The errors will be ammended, the books will be neatly balanced, and on paper, all will be right with the world once again.

But we won't forget what we've been put through. We're worn out by this.

And my concern is that when you have a system that glosses over and forgets the errors so readily, there's no interest in insuring that it doesn't happen again, and again, and again... and so all that silent heartache just keeps getting poured out on to the poor citizenry, as if it's no big deal.

You only need to look at the death and despair inflicted by the robodebt fiasco to see how hazardous these sorts of problems can become.

So I just think that somebody with a voice that matters (e.g. SANE) needs to call our major institutions out on this.

There's all this talk now about how mental health needs to be woven deep into the functionality of our society. Businesses are being pushed to incorporate a "mentally healthy workplace" focus into the heart of their business models. The government is being urged to take a "whole of government" approach to mental health. So we need our leaders to start acknowledging the significant mental health impacts of bad beaurocracy.

Whenever someone is looking to save a lot of money by making significant cuts to the beaurocracy, we need someone to be double checking that the propose changes will be measured not only in "money saved", but also in "heartache inflicted."