n.V2-6.07| THE PROCEDURE

01| Asking whether bureaucracy is good or bad for the poor produces nothing, because procedure is not one thing but a mechanism with two opposite effects. The useful question is which functions it protects and which it blocks, and both lists are real, neither cancelling the other. This chapter is the one most likely to be got wrong by people arriving with good intentions, because the obstacles are visible from the barrio and the protections are not. Anyone who reads procedure as pure obstruction is describing half of it and will design against the wrong thing.

rle// whose asking? (Asking whether bureaucracy is good or bad )

02| Start with what procedure protects, since that half is usually skipped. Requiring a receipt, a signature, a register, a countersignature and an audit trail exists because public money without those things is taken, and the poor lose most when it is taken because they have no alternative supply. A rule applied uniformly is also the only defence available to a person with no connections: discretion is a resource, and wherever it exists it gets exercised in favour of those who can reach the person holding it. The form is the poor person's protection against the better-connected neighbour, which is exactly the opposite of how the form feels while you are filling it in.

rle// it is simplistic to think that IkoCiti is challenging a system of procedures and checks. What needs to be challenged is how the execution happens, how the rules are conflictive, how the system reacts to critique, how the system demands its authority needs to be confirmed above finding common-sense solutions> How employees of teh system are dumbed down by having to obey rules at all cost instead of seeking solutions or doing a risk assessment of the problem. All this has huge idden cost that coud be much bigger than the cost of honest errors

03| Procedure does two further things that are easy to underrate. A refusal issued with a stated reason under a published rule can be appealed, while a refusal with no rule behind it can only be endured — so the rule is what converts an outcome into something contestable. And a procedure outlives the official who applied it, carrying a commitment past the person who made it, which is the same permanence that in the chapter on the electoral clock turned out to be the one device that let anything last beyond a term. Procedure is therefore not merely a constraint on officials; it is the main technology governments have for keeping promises.

rle// in theory yes and it is important but everything depends on how easy and cheap the appeal is for poor people. The system has a strong tendency to protect itself (the people in charge) by prolonging the solution (if any) to the the appeal.

04| Now the other half. Verification takes time, and a person in crisis does not have any: a process that is admirably fair at eight weeks is useless at eight weeks to a family being evicted in two. Every procedure also runs on documents, and the people in the greatest need are systematically the least documented — proof of address presumes a formal address, proof of income presumes a formal income, and proof of identity presumes that a birth was registered. Procedural fairness turns out to be fairness among those who can present themselves in the required form, which quietly excludes the population the procedure was written to protect.

rle// it is a system made for the middle-class and up. (nobody says it is easy). It also creates a perspective where the world is seen from the rules of the system; not from the perspective of common sense.

After having had 8-12 pasports stating my birthplace to be Aruba, after having had a drivers license issued by Curacao, after having of a birthday certificate forNVT Permit issued by the government of Curacao, after being issued a sedula and health card, Kranshi demanded that I followed an not-published rule - first time renewals of passport for those born outside Curacao need to show a birthday certificate

It is a one case in millions of cases around the world where teh system is not governed by commonsense but by the need to confirm Authorty.|

the issue is not the procedures; nor that it can have hard consequences for people. that is all in teh game but that each part of teh system start making rules that in some cases are conflictive coupled with the inability to be self-critical in the periodic review of teh rules - What risks do we confront> And how do the rules reduce them? And where are teh conflicts and where are the gaps? And what fo we do when confronted complaints?

05| Two further blockages follow from the same design. An official who knows a family personally and can see their situation is nonetheless required to act on the file rather than on the knowledge — which is the protection of ¶02 working exactly as intended, and simultaneously means true information is thrown away because it arrived in the wrong format. And a rule written for the general case cannot bend to the particular one without becoming discretion, at which point every problem in ¶02 reopens. There is no design that escapes this; there are only different positions along it.

rle// of course there is a design for this. First by calculating (guestimating) the real cost of failure to deliver customized services. And by allowing more personal discretion of personel with knowledge; accepting honest errors. By creating a much more transparent system in which personal decisions are traceable by AI. And by punishing those employees hwo commit fraud as seen a sa patterns of misjudgement of favoritism? The system needs to give employees a template of steps of decisions?

06| So the trade is structural rather than a failure of implementation: every increase in procedural protection raises the burden of access, and every reduction in burden widens discretion. That is not a flaw in the design space, it is the design space, and any programme sits somewhere on that line whether or not anyone chose the position deliberately. The relevant question when assessing a government is therefore not how bureaucratic it is but where on that line it has placed itself, and whether the placement was a decision or an accident. Both ends of the line are defensible and both have identifiable victims.

rle:// the key question of the bureaucracy is how active are you in delivering the best system to the public you serve and not to demand the public obey non-sensical rules that do not reduce the risk profile substantially? But again, all is useless if you do not calculate the cost of not delivering the services to those who legally deserve it?

07| Two devices partly escape the trade, and they are the most valuable findings in this part. The first is shifting the burden of proof to the state: where the administration verifies entitlement from data it already holds instead of requiring the applicant to produce documents, the protection is retained in full and the burden collapses toward zero. This is the same result that closed the take-up gap in the previous chapter, arriving now from the procedural side, and the fact that two independent literatures converge on it is the strongest evidence available in this part.

rle// it means a Gov that invest in tech to improve its services

08| The second device is presumptive eligibility with post-hoc audit: admit on the applicant's own statement, pay, and verify a sample afterwards. Fraud rises somewhat and exclusion falls sharply, so the question is which of the two errors the system is more afraid of. That answer is almost always revealed rather than stated, because — as the previous chapter established — only one of the two errors ever appears in an audit at all. A government's real position on this trade can therefore be read from its behaviour even when its stated policy says something else.

rle// The second device is presumptive eligibility with post-hoc audit: \What kind of language is this?? Not what i want

09| What this means for a barrio is a double bind rather than a villain. The procedures that keep money from being stolen and keep the well-connected from jumping the queue are the same procedures that exclude the undocumented, the illiterate and the person who cannot lose a day's wages, and attacking one attacks the other. Anything that promises to cut through the paperwork is promising discretion, and discretion has a known beneficiary — and it is not the person with the fewest connections. Where a government sits on this line, and whether it can be moved toward verifying from its own data rather than demanding documents, is what to read before entering.