Facebook is an all-purpose outrage platform. Here’s a friend’s posting:
The MA RMV [Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles] wants $25 to replace a lost registration. They suggest that you do it online and print it yourself. So I logged in to do that. They still want the $25!
He thought it should cost less to use the web site compared to going into a Registry office and waiting in line for two hours.
Given the cost of managing Internet security (see Swiss pour cold water on our Internet dreams from 2015, for example, in which they predict that the cost of securing the Internet will exceed its value to a typical business by 2019), could it be that his proportional share of the security cost is actually more than $25? So it should actually cost more to deal with the government online compared to the in-person fees? (The RMV presumably has somewhat higher security risks than a vanilla ecommerce site.)
[Separately, why did paper registration survive 20 years of mobile Internet and 60 years of computer-managed databases? Police officers are supposed to be connected to a network, at least by voice communication to a dispatcher. Why can’t they look up a car by VIN or license plate? Why rely on a paper document that can be forged and that is a hassle to distribute?]
Phil,
Addressing the last paragraph in your post, are you kidding? Or was that a rhetorical question? Government has more wasteful and useless jobs than anything else.
The police officer can look it up, it’s just an extra fine (tax) they get to charge if you don’t have it.
The big problem for state and local government now is pension/retiree costs, which consume a large and (in most places) growing fraction of agency budgets.
The next biggest problem is that government agencies exist chiefly to provide cushy lifetime careers to their employees (no matter what ostensible purpose agencies were created to accomplish) and intend to provide those careers even to employees whose activities have been made pointless by technology.
So agencies choose to direct the surplus from any productivity gains to pension contributions and featherbedding, not to reducing service fees. That is why agencies charge the same fees for online self-service as for counter service– online self-service is much cheaper for an agency to supply so it yields the agency much more “profit” that it can use for pensions and featherbedding. Since the “customers” are really captives obliged to deal with the agency, there is no danger that the price of online self-service can be “competed down” below the price the agency sets for counter service, no matter how much more productive an online service may be.
@Philg: it is true that a police officer can lookup a vehicle owner from the plate, and as I’m sure you know, they have cameras attached to cruisers that routinely scan plates and alert the officer for any vehicle on the lookout. The paper registration is needed (and it must be in your vehicle at all times) for cases when there is an accident and you need to exchange documents with the owner of the other driver.