After recently dealing with the various governments / nationalised businesses from a number of countries I can safely say that I am well and truly fed up with their inane bureaucracy.
This article doesn't surprise me: where the recent swath of internet companies seem to extoll individual agency/ownership, nationalised companies seem to preach the exact opposite - a problem is never the individual's responsibility and people seem perfectly happy to ship a borken status quo. As such, ludicrous oversights like this are a regular occurrence rather than a gross intolerable negligence.
This is not even yet mentioning how awful the UX is for the customer who has to interface with these institutions.
While it may be very easy to discard my point as rife with cliches, it's worth noting that we have become very spoilt by ruthlessly frictionless (yet equally effective) customer-facing tech products. The opportunities to streamline processes and save time and money for state-owned interfaces (both online and offline). As an example, I recently had to queue in a hospital with my sick mother for an hour, to be told that that individual couldn't process our particular issue and that we would have to join the back of the adjacent queue (not there was zero signposting whatsoever). This is one example and not a criticism on healthcare, but what happened to service-driven processes?
Instead we, the public, have to live with the dire reality of inefficient (and increasinly apparently indifferent) government services as the gap between private and state run services continues to expand as we grow increasingly disenfranchised.