It is endemic across society. People confuse goals with results all the time, and accept that inspections are scheduled or that some box was checked in lieu of

It is endemic across society. People confuse goals with results all the time, and accept that inspections are scheduled or that some box was checked in lieu of an "actual" inspection all the time. It is one of the major reasons that I am always very skeptical of the "just throw more regulations at it" solution to anything; generating paperwork and generating compliance are two very different things. The fundamental error of bureaucracy is to conflate paperwork with reality. The shocking thing is that as cynical as that may sound, things do in fact generally work. This suggests that the problem is less on the side of reality and more on the side of the paperwork and the bureaucracy. You see this one instance where the mismatch is problematic, but honestly there's immense mismatch everywhere, and generally, things work, because while in bureaucratic theory a mismatch between paperwork and reality is itself intrinsically a problem, in reality, it's only a problem if something goes wrong, and usually it doesn't. If that doesn't make sense to you, consider that there is an evolutionary process in play. The particular ways in which mismatches cause real problems tend to get squeezed out of the system by the very failures they create, whereas all the harmless mismatches can persist. And yeah, eventually some of those "harmless" mismatches will get upgraded to "whoops less harmless than we thought", but they will be the exceptions, not the rule, and calling in advance which they will be is a lot harder than meets the eye. There's kind of a variant of Gell-Mann Amnesia at work here; $YOU know that in the specific place you work, paperwork is a faint echo of reality, documentation is perpetually underinvested in, processes are constantly diverging from the paper processes, the field workers in charge of managing paperwork generally coevolve a particular "flavor" of compliance that passes initial checks but may have shall we say "complicated" relationships with reality... but $YOU think that all the other paperwork in the world is being done studiously by superhumans with unflagging concentration, impeccable ethics, and presumably, about 96 hours in their day. It seems to be built into the human condition somehow. Somehow, we are all bureaucrats at heart.