The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time

It's the same evil math behind every other billing scam that sails under the flag of ignorance.

Speaking of ignorance, to all those people saying you forgot to fill out a form, there are several states that are known to be maliciously sloppy about this sort of thing. You file a form and they silently reject it or billing you anyway on some questionable pretext because they can. NY is one of them. Doesn't surprise me that IL is too since both states are kinda cash strapped.

I was traveling through the state and got on a toll road by accident without cash to pay the tolls, the toll booth employee said I could just pay online, pointing to a sign that said "missed a toll? pay online at <url>", so we continued our trip intending to pay the tolls online. At the end of the trip, I logged on to pay our tolls--the application insisted that we enter the specific toll IDs of each toll that we missed, even though we didn't know we were supposed to be recording any toll IDs. If you didn't know the toll IDs, you could use a map application to look up the toll IDs, but the map application would crash within a second of opening it and even if you managed to get a screenshot the resolution was so low that the text was indecipherable. When I called the support number, they told me that I would be fined triple the cost of the tolls if I didn't pay within a week, but I would be able to pay without knowing the specific toll IDs that I missed. When I asked the agent to tell me what tolls I missed (clearly they knew if they were going to fine me), they told me they couldn't tell me for another week. I pointed out that this would be after the toll deadline and they relentlessly tried to avoid acknowledging that simple fact. Eventually I sent them my best guess about what I owed with a letter stating what I had attempted and that I would contact a lawyer about any fines and never heard from them again.

Some years later, after moving to Chicago, I had to file state taxes for the first time. The state issued me a driver's license with a 12 digit number, but the state tax form only allowed me to authenticate with an 8 digit Illinois driver's license number (the other acceptable forms of identification didn't apply to me for reasons I no longer remember).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_Tax_Board_of_Califor...

The idea is that it funds public broadcasting and productions thereof, but like a lot of SOEs here, there is loads of corruption and inefficiencies, I only use my TV for streaming of content which is not produced locally, so I resent having to pay it each year.

However, it’s apparently a mission to get off it, even if you sell your TV you’re most certainly going to be harassed for years by debt collectors and what not.

Unlike your case though (where I expect the fine is not nothing), it’s only like R250/y (like 13USD) and they’ve smartly (which is surprising for an otherwise largely incompetent org), made it easy to pay. I get an SMS reminder and can have paid it by credit card within 2 minutes. So I’ll probably not bother trying to get off it as it’s so much more effort and a pretty small amount of money and hassle.

Every single time they replace an old system with something else they all manage to add additional complicity. Don't know if you get to use HERA in your department but it is a complete pile of mess.

a/k/a regulatory capture. Large established vendors can afford the staffing to deal with this, small startups either cannot or they miss an obscure step in the process and they are excluded.

As someone who bids for these contracts, my outsider view of the procurement process is that it seems to spends so much time and effort being fair and impartial, that it actually ends up:

* Giving too much information to suppliers (i.e. who else is bidding and how much the government will pay) - These things are never given in private sector contracts but you are often told with a public sector procurement process.

* Being a checkbox excercise, with scorecard criteria that can tip the balance that don't have anything to do with how well the company actually does the job.

* The procurement process itself can say to companies 'we are hard to deal with, uncooperative and don't really know what we want', which will obviously influence pricing. I've seen tender documents say silly things like you will be disqualified if you can't make an in-person meeting about the tender given 24 hours notice. Tender documents often contain 49 pages of waffle and almost zero specification of what is actually expected to be delivered (while this is common in the private sector too, it's much worse in the public sector in terms of how poorly defined tenders are).

* Often they have classic procurement footguns, like mandating cost down initiatives throughout the contract which everyone on the sales side knows means 'build in extra margin in years 1 & 2 to fake cost down to year 3'

* The process is so 'fair' that it ignores who will actually do the job for the best total value (mix of quality and cost). This is maybe a little subjective, but often you can end up with what appear to be bizarre awards from an outside perspective.

Slide 1ish: State cares about emissions, take it very seriously if you want to keep your license.

Slide 2ish: State gives no fucks either way about "safety" inspections, they don't affect squat and aren't worth the money so far as our studies and stats can tell

Slide 3ish: If it wasn't obvious, "safety" is your blank check to sell work and in return the state expects you to take emissions seriously.

The rest of the slides were technicalities and requirements and the final slide was a recap of 1-3.

I too am glad I was exposed to such things early on.

When I left, people were advising me to become a vendor, which was what a lot of people did as a retirement plan. You'd go to the secret portal and fill out the inscrutable forms, then give them to someone who you probably knew at the special time. Then the state would order things from you, and you would simply order them from Amazon or Uline or whatever. There was also a trade in minority and female figureheads (to white male businesses) to get you prioritized.

First, surely they know the contravention code because they gave me the ticket?!

Second, the two digit contravention code was actually a part of a three digit alphanumeric code found in this sentence "52m Failing to comply with a prohibition".

Welcome to the future.

The main problems are a) logging into gov.uk to do it is endlessly tedious, and b) monthly?? I thought all the childcare reconfirmations and security questions were bad enough.

I think the correct way would be a one-click link in an email though!

In another European country where I work (Finland) it’s as you describe but it’s still more than doing absolutely nothing that I did in the UK.

Largely because unscrupulous restaurants had, I think they were called “zippers” to perma-erase revenue/transactions.

Some EU countries did a “if you don’t get a receipt, you don’t have to pay”, which erased the concept of a bar tab. During a drinking session with friends, you’d end up with a stack of receipts to pay as you got a receipt with each beer request.

Income taxes are a similar idea: employer pays on your behalf and then you do some manual or virtually automatic reconciliation at the end of the year. Canada is pretty much the latter where the gov already has all the info and you can import it into your tax software where most people don’t have to change anything.

I dunno why countries like sales taxes but low tariffs. Would be easier to tariff imports at a small number of points and let everything internal run free. Why have sales tax on local production.

The more “tax points” you create, the harder it’s going to be to enforce it all.

And that's especially ironic since the whole point of the "Low Value Purchase System" is to make selling to government less time-consuming for small businesses!