From a purely technical perspective, there's no way to know if something "works" if it hasn't been defined or - worse! - is constantly being redefined on the fly.
That is true for oh so many government IT projects. The part that I still struggle to comprehend is "Why on earth aren't the IT companies, like IBM, telling governments that what they're asking isn't actually possible?"
The Danish government have an insane amount of failed IT projects. Most of them fails do to the complexity of laws, rules and requirements. We even know that they'll fail before they even start. Most good developers are able to predict this with great accuracy. So why aren't IBM and other telling governments that what they're asking isn't possible?
My best guess: Because their lawyers will ensure that they're paid anyway, and because they have absolutely no pride in their work.
You can't hurt the reputation of IBM, or at least it won't matter, because their competitors have equally poor reputation, and no one else is going to bid on the jobs they take on.
The problem is not lowest bid (which few government contracts are any more, AFAIK), but the fact that government contracting is its own domain of expertise (actually, often a separate domain for each state plus the federal government, and even many local governments) separate from the kind of work actually being contracted for, and there are in any field a very small number of players (compared to the field as a whole) that have developed expertise in the "winning government contracts" domain (and, in IT, IBM is one of them, at essentially every level of government.)
Of course you can pay more.
-- OracleLast minute changes to a law with a looming implementation deadline so that someone can score political points = everyone is non-compliant for some period
You can't rewrite 30-year old COBOL-backed business processes overnight.