2011-01-13|Harper announces Red Tape Reduction Commission
To the Editor
Here is a typical example of extreme idiocy of government bureaucracy.
I went to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)'s website for filing the T4 Summary of my small business, as I do once a year. Firstly, I saw this shocking statement.
"The CRA has introduced a new registration and login process that replaces your epass for CRA login services."
Instead of allowing the customer's existing epass user ID and password to be used in the new registration and login process, here is what CRA's system says.
"All user ID's and passwords expired on October 4, 2010."
So, I had to create a new CRA account, and wait one week for a CRA security code to arrive in the snail mail. Once it arrived, here is the first message I got on CRA's website.
"CER.010: Our services are not available at this time."
Whatever "CER.010" means. When I was finally able to enter the website, one of the security questions that I had to set up was "How old was your father when you were born?". It involved some calculation, but I was able to determine my father's age when I was born, i.e., 28.
When I entered "28" (without the double quotes) as the answer, the system complained saying that the answer must be 3 characters or longer. I immediately telephoned the customer service to flag the bug to be fixed. The agent told me that I should spell it out like "twenty eight". I pointed out that I would answer "28" next year since I will not have remembered to spell it out, so the system will reject my answer of "28". Even after I thoroughly explained the scenario to the agent, she did not agree that it was a bad question, and refused to contact the software developer.
When I finished the transaction, CRA's system did not remember the user ID and password, unlike almost all other secure electronic transaction websites including Apple, PayPal, eBay, Amazon, etc. It means that I will have to write them down now and search for them next year...
Red tape reduction requires a genuine paradigm shift in government mentality.
