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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many years the US could save its citizens by modernizing and digitizing the IRS, DMV, etc. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

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I recently discovered that the U.S. Social Security Administration has business hours ... for their website. They operate a website that is closed at night and on weekends. One is hard-pressed to imagine the level of IT dysfunction necessary to reach this point.

I investigated that once, and I don't think it's IT dysfunction in that case. My understanding (because I found this odd as well) is that it's because the support load for that site is so high, and the likelihood of abandoned processes without support so high, that the best solution they had at whatever point in time they instituted that was business-hours operation.

I have not researched this but rather than being a sign of IT dysfunction my guess would be the government contracts out the maintenance of the web site to the private sector and the contract specs happen to be written to say it will be closed on nights and weekends. In theory this makes the contract cheaper than if the government was buying 24/7 support.

It would seem to us that nights and weekends are the most convenient time for citizens to access government services such as this. But the things that are down for maintenance are not our publicly-accessible frontends, they're the backend databases that the administration uses internally as well.

So it would seem that all the worker bees in government offices rely on having access to those backend databases during USA office hours, and the only time they can realistically be shut down is while the civil servants are off the clock.

I view a database that needs to go down for maintenance as "IT dysfunction".

Probably so that there's no backlog buildup over the weekend?

Backlog of? You can go to SSA.gov and look at your statements, but only if it's weekday business hours in the lower 48, otherwise you cannot.

The Bangladesh Embassy in D.C. had a similar issue a few years ago. They had a document you needed to fill out that was just hosted on someones computer and when that person would shut their computer down each night or over the weekend the link would stop working. They've at least fixed that since then.

IRS is same way: have to get EIN through form during business hours.

Long ago, the Best Buy website also closed then opened during business hours.

The IRS/tax problem is one of corporate lobbying and partisan politics (usually the proposals to reduce or eliminate tax regulations are met by opposition).

US democracy could change by having a central registry of everyone, ensuring everyone gets their voting pass automatically, skipping the faulty and bumpy process of voter registration amd inequality of identification-ability

The opposition to national registries and national ID here is extremely strong.

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