The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
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Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#2They should just have a "suspend account" option. You file a nil return once, suspend, never come back unless you have to. Seems easy enough.
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#3Government employees and departments need performance incentives. And not ones that are so far removed from their day-to-day as "voting."
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#4[flagged]
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#5My spouse did business at a collector show in Illinois years ago. We filed some sales tax thing, as we collected sales tax (as we were told to do) and remitted it. Did that for... 2 years, IIRC, then didn't do that show again. We got letters threatening that we would be penalized if we didn't fill out the form and remit our collected tax. There was no option to say 'nothing'. I mean... we did one year - put 0. Then we stopped the business. Had multiple emails, physical letters, and hours on the phone being bounced around between places to say "we don't run the business any more - we're not operating". And... no one seemed to have a way to decidedly stop these. We'd get "OK" then... 6 months later got a letter saying "you owe $x and penalties for failing to file"... I was slightly concerned about driving through Illinois at some point, thinking they might have an arrest warrant out for one of us. It took 2 years of not getting these to finally believe we're not in their system any more. Similar story for New Jersey, but it wasn't quite as bad. Still required a lot of manual work.
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#6I think "machine readable" in UK government parlance might just mean 'not hard copy' but I'm not 100%.
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#7Their medium value purchase system is a waste of time too - I work for a small business that does government contracts and you have to pay the government just for the pleasure of bidding for contracts.
Then every bid has it's own unique weird things, where often you are told who you are bidding against and sometimes even how much the government wants to pay!
The scorecards are often weird, will do things like ask you to write mini-essays with word limits where you get penalised for being over the word count, or where 20% of the bid points are based on a combination of diversity and impact on the local community/environment rather than on who will do the job best at the lowest price.
The entire process is completely broken, and has no reference to good/standard procurement processes in the private sector.
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#8> So the GCA are wasting everyone's time and do not track how annoying it is.
I am 80% sure that someone is aware how much waste there is, but nobody wants to / is able to change the process. Just like many other organizations.
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#9The ridiculous system of "you have to tell us you've done nothing" seems endemic in the UK government.
Re: The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time
#10This blog post title would be better worded "small business owner is surprised by contract term he signed up for".
I mean, it does say it right there in black and white in the Supplier Contract that he signed up for ....
Section 3 CCS - Supplier contract, Reporting Period: "The Supplier must complete an MI Report and return it to CCS by the fifth Working Day of every month during the Term and thereafter until all transactions relating to any Buyer Contract have permanently ceased. If at any point there is a period of a month where no reportable transactions occur, then the Supplier must make a declaration to CCS confirming no business has been conducted, in place of data submission."