alt Hacker News> She was talking to a blind man living below the poverty line. She assumed that "fax it" was an impossible hurdle. She assumed I would have to find a ride to a library, pay twenty cents a page, and struggle with a physical machine I couldn't read. She was counting on the friction of the physical world to make me give up.
Does this author live in a country where the government staff has incentive to reject the dole? Some kind of KPI? Otherwise why the author assume this woman is actively trying to stop him from getting his benefit?
I genuinely wonder that. In my country I've never heard that.
Replies
I'm almost certain this is from the UK, and here we have a government that is absolutely obsessed by the concept of benefits fraud. Every real analysis has shown that virtually none exists, but it is a good excuse to tighten up the government budget by trimming some fat (disabled people).
Depends on what kind of dole you are on. Unemployment isn't terribly difficult. Disability is nigh impossible. Took a decade for one of my family members to get it. From what I've seen they want to see you're broke and jobless for a very long time before they will believe you.
Mere disability re-verification is pretty minor when it comes to bureaucratic insanity. For comparison, in the UK, in recent memory almost a thousand postal service contractors were wrongly convicted of crimes based entirely on a broken government accounting system that constantly got tbe numbers wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).
Really? Are you sure?
The UK disability system is notorious for compliance hurdles. Quite a lot of people including relatives of mine have had claims denied by the bureaucracy, applied for review (which is done by an external judge), and had it reinstated.
It was even worse when the system was outsourced to ATOS.
I've also heard stories about the Norwegian NAV. I don't think this is confined to any one country.
It's not hard to understand. There's constant political budget pressure, and narratives about "scoungers". So the system gets set to default-deny and told to limit the cost of claims by any means necessary.