6 ms·

When I wanted to have compiled [1] financials, PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me to pick a recognized accounting system, then change the company's business process

When I wanted to have compiled [1] financials, PriceWaterhouseCoopers told me to pick a recognized accounting system, then change the company's business processes to match that. They said absolutely not to go the other way, to try to customize any software to match our business. I think about that every time I read about another government (or private!) company that wastes tens or hundreds of million of dollars (or euros or pounds) on custom software. It seems like there should be 1, 2, or 3 DMV programs. The same for building codes, tax codes, etc. And prison software. You can be more like Massachusetts or Mississippi or Montana (hypothetical examples) but pick one and harmonize with it. 1: compiled is the lowest of 3 standards that outside accountants can do; "reviewed" is higher and "audited" is the highest. Even at the compiled level they mailed out postcards to a certain number of customers asking if they were customers over the past year and had spent this much money. It was fairly easy for the acquiring company's outside accountants to review PWC's work and bring it up to audited standard.

er4hn 6y ago
This advice appears based on deficiencies in programming however. Programs operate on algorithms to process data. When the programs or algorithms fail to be able to do so properly the program is at fault. In your cases you have items like: accounting, building codes, tax codes, automobile codes, etc. While it makes sense to try and harmonize with the general policies, every state, every municipality, and every business is going to have special cases. Even software has edge cases for protocol behaviors. What would be nicer, imho, is if all of these laws were written in domain specific languages that specify the law and then the software could just pick up the definitions signed into law. Lawyers as they are feel like a combination of legal interpreters, combined with a combination of being red/blue security team members depending on what they are doing.
- sterlind 6y ago
  My dad actually created a (failed) startup in the early '00s that modeled immigration law in Prolog, enabling the creation of legally accurate forms and resolving complex legal queries. It was a good idea, it just failed due to infighting and mismanagement. are there popular languages for implementing these types of DSLs?
  - birktj 6y ago
    Sounds like a suitable task for formal verification languages like Coq and Isabelle.
airstrike 6y ago
An alternative is to have the federal government offer the "federal choice" which states and local governments can choose to use instead of rolling out their own.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  In states, counties and cities a lot of contracting basically has the purpose of pushing money to well connected people. They don’t want an efficient and cost effective solution. I know somebody who audits municipalities. We did a graph that showed relations between different players. It’s basically just a big insider club of usually 20-40 people and families that give contracts to each other at the expense of the tax payer.
  - jdeibele 6y ago
    One of the things we've lost with the decline of newspapers is investigating and publicizing things like this. Locally, the city decided to disconnect its open air reservoirs and replace them with reservoirs underground. It's a huge construction project and there are supposed to be close relationships between the water bureau and the prime contractor. Close as the #2 at the water bureau being married to a VP at the contractor. People retiring from the bureau and going to work for the company. And so on. The city, county, and state legally have to publish notices in a paper that meets certain standards. If the city doesn't like its coverage, it can move its advertising. This probably didn't matter 20 years ago but newspaper want/need every cent they can get.
reillyse 6y ago
This appears to me to be a terrible idea. In effect you would have private companies writing the laws of the land. "I'm sorry California you can't change your laws because it doesn't fit into the three options we have available at our preferred software vendor". Seems like the tail wagging the dog.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Login.gov cribbed off of the UK’s digital office that built a similar system. I believe that’s what OP was alluding too. How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV systems do you need? These are common components across governments. Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government partners. Your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and competent, instead of every city and state reinventing the wheel (poorly and in expensively).
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government partners. Congrats, your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and competent. Outside of functions that are joint state-federal to start with, states tend to treat the federal government as just another outside sovereign (and one whose Administration is intermittently actively politically hostile), which is worse than a private contractor in terms of being able to get them to uphold their end of a contract. So, not someone you’d outsource to unless you were more concerned about having someone else to blame if things go wrong than actually being able to assure that things go right. > How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV systems do you need? These are common components across governments. Mostly, not, because while the names may be the same, the actual laws setting the system requirements tend to be radically different.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
dragonwriter 6y ago
> It seems like there should be 1, 2, or 3 DMV programs. The same for building codes, tax codes, etc. And prison software. You can be more like Massachusetts or Mississippi or Montana (hypothetical examples) but pick one and harmonize with it. Kind of defeats the entire purpose of having states to start with. If we want to make the US a centralized, unitary state, let's do that through the elected central government and not through deferral to IT contractors.
ohboichamois 6y ago
FWIW this is actually (mostly) the case for building codes. The standard in the USA is the International Building Code (and other related code by the International Code Council), which each jurisdiction adopts into law and amends as needed for local conditions or practices. And these codes in turn reference other international standards specific to the knowledge domain.
curryst 6y ago
That's hard to do because all of those systems are intertwined. If you use the Montana DMV program, and you want people who get DUIs to have their driver's license suspended, now you have to use the Montana Penal System program. Except Montana's Penal System has a bunch of exceptions written into it for laws that can be either a misdemeanor or a felony, and they don't allow any time off for good behavior. So now are you going to adopt Montana's laws too? There's tax code stuff in there too, so I guess we're lumping in the Montana tax system as well. I think the problem is that unlike our more notable branches, we don't hire experts in the field. I don't mean they're incompetent at technology, but that a problem like this really exists at the intersection of government and technology. We keep hiring general-purpose contractors to build things like this, and then we're shocked when it falls apart in the environment governments exist in. We need companies that specialize in this intersection. Companies that can keep public sentiment in mind and build an architecture that's flexible in the places where society is. It's the same way that most of us in general purpose IT try to build systems that can adapt to changes in the IT landscape. Put it in Docker so we can run it on a cloud, on bare metal, on k8s and probably on whatever's next. Governments struggle to pivot like that due to funding (how do you argue for funding for features since you can't earn revenue?), and because a lot of it is legislated out of their control. Learning to read the public sentiment is just like us reading trends in a newsletter.

er4hn 6y ago

This advice appears based on deficiencies in programming however. Programs operate on algorithms to process data. When the programs or algorithms fail to be able to do so properly the program is at fault. In your cases you have items like: accounting, building codes, tax codes, automobile codes, etc. While it makes sense to try and harmonize with the general policies, every state, every municipality, and every business is going to have special cases. Even software has edge cases for protocol behaviors. What would be nicer, imho, is if all of these laws were written in domain specific languages that specify the law and then the software could just pick up the definitions signed into law. Lawyers as they are feel like a combination of legal interpreters, combined with a combination of being red/blue security team members depending on what they are doing.

sterlind 6y ago
My dad actually created a (failed) startup in the early '00s that modeled immigration law in Prolog, enabling the creation of legally accurate forms and resolving complex legal queries. It was a good idea, it just failed due to infighting and mismanagement. are there popular languages for implementing these types of DSLs?
- birktj 6y ago
  Sounds like a suitable task for formal verification languages like Coq and Isabelle.

airstrike 6y ago

An alternative is to have the federal government offer the "federal choice" which states and local governments can choose to use instead of rolling out their own.

spaetzleesser 6y ago
In states, counties and cities a lot of contracting basically has the purpose of pushing money to well connected people. They don’t want an efficient and cost effective solution. I know somebody who audits municipalities. We did a graph that showed relations between different players. It’s basically just a big insider club of usually 20-40 people and families that give contracts to each other at the expense of the tax payer.
- jdeibele 6y ago
  One of the things we've lost with the decline of newspapers is investigating and publicizing things like this. Locally, the city decided to disconnect its open air reservoirs and replace them with reservoirs underground. It's a huge construction project and there are supposed to be close relationships between the water bureau and the prime contractor. Close as the #2 at the water bureau being married to a VP at the contractor. People retiring from the bureau and going to work for the company. And so on. The city, county, and state legally have to publish notices in a paper that meets certain standards. If the city doesn't like its coverage, it can move its advertising. This probably didn't matter 20 years ago but newspaper want/need every cent they can get.

reillyse 6y ago

This appears to me to be a terrible idea. In effect you would have private companies writing the laws of the land. "I'm sorry California you can't change your laws because it doesn't fit into the three options we have available at our preferred software vendor". Seems like the tail wagging the dog.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Login.gov cribbed off of the UK’s digital office that built a similar system. I believe that’s what OP was alluding too. How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV systems do you need? These are common components across governments. Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government partners. Your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and competent, instead of every city and state reinventing the wheel (poorly and in expensively).
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government partners. Congrats, your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and competent. Outside of functions that are joint state-federal to start with, states tend to treat the federal government as just another outside sovereign (and one whose Administration is intermittently actively politically hostile), which is worse than a private contractor in terms of being able to get them to uphold their end of a contract. So, not someone you’d outsource to unless you were more concerned about having someone else to blame if things go wrong than actually being able to assure that things go right. > How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV systems do you need? These are common components across governments. Mostly, not, because while the names may be the same, the actual laws setting the system requirements tend to be radically different.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
boomboomsubban 6y ago

dragonwriter 6y ago

> It seems like there should be 1, 2, or 3 DMV programs. The same for building codes, tax codes, etc. And prison software. You can be more like Massachusetts or Mississippi or Montana (hypothetical examples) but pick one and harmonize with it. Kind of defeats the entire purpose of having states to start with. If we want to make the US a centralized, unitary state, let's do that through the elected central government and not through deferral to IT contractors.

ohboichamois 6y ago

FWIW this is actually (mostly) the case for building codes. The standard in the USA is the International Building Code (and other related code by the International Code Council), which each jurisdiction adopts into law and amends as needed for local conditions or practices. And these codes in turn reference other international standards specific to the knowledge domain.

curryst 6y ago

That's hard to do because all of those systems are intertwined. If you use the Montana DMV program, and you want people who get DUIs to have their driver's license suspended, now you have to use the Montana Penal System program. Except Montana's Penal System has a bunch of exceptions written into it for laws that can be either a misdemeanor or a felony, and they don't allow any time off for good behavior. So now are you going to adopt Montana's laws too? There's tax code stuff in there too, so I guess we're lumping in the Montana tax system as well. I think the problem is that unlike our more notable branches, we don't hire experts in the field. I don't mean they're incompetent at technology, but that a problem like this really exists at the intersection of government and technology. We keep hiring general-purpose contractors to build things like this, and then we're shocked when it falls apart in the environment governments exist in. We need companies that specialize in this intersection. Companies that can keep public sentiment in mind and build an architecture that's flexible in the places where society is. It's the same way that most of us in general purpose IT try to build systems that can adapt to changes in the IT landscape. Put it in Docker so we can run it on a cloud, on bare metal, on k8s and probably on whatever's next. Governments struggle to pivot like that due to funding (how do you argue for funding for features since you can't earn revenue?), and because a lot of it is legislated out of their control. Learning to read the public sentiment is just like us reading trends in a newsletter.