"Sinkhole of bureaucracy"

"Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.

But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.

The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.

This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system...

Now that all the retiree’s digital data have been turned into paperwork, these workers turn that paperwork into digital data again. They type all the pertinent information into a computer, by hand.

“You can do a case in as little as an hour,” said Bonnie McCandless, the president of the center’s local labor union, whose job is entering this data. “Or you can do a case as long as eight hours, or two days.”

The task takes so much time in part because Congress has made the federal retirement rules extremely complex. The center’s workers must verify and key in information that answers a huge range of questions: What were the retiree’s three years of highest salary? Was the retiree a firefighter? A military veteran? A cafeteria worker at the U.S. Capitol? What about part-time service?

All those answers can change the final pension payment. “One hundred years of bad laws,” McCandless said."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/

This was such a great read. And it's true, once you get these massive organizations where no one is directly responsible for a given thing, and the people who make the decisions (but don't carry them out) tend to only be around for a few years and are then followed by someone else who wants to add something too... You end up with situations.

FB: Stop what you are doing and enjoy the peak absurdity of this article. "The existence of a mine full of federal paperwork is not well known: Even within the federal workforce, it is often treated as an urban legend, mythic and half-believed­. “That crazy cave,” said Aneesh Chopra, who served as President Obama’s chief technology officer... “You don’t forget that it’s a cave,” said Ashley Weber, a former temp who worked on the mine’s incoming files. “But they try to make it look as not-cave-like as you can.”"