I wrote this post “And yet“ nearly three years ago, warning that it was unnecessary because we are all convinced of the importance of data quality, and we all act accordingly.

However, today again comes to my mind this quote from H. L. Mencken, telling us “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong”. I remember, for instance, an anecdotal story in which an administrator asked to send a letter to all the banks. The person who received the request, new in office, decided to make a query name and look for taxpayers that have the word “bank” in their name or trade name. Of course, employees from the Blood Bank did not quite understand the request made by the tax administration about deposits that are made in the entity.

A less innocuous case was a very urgent request, in the 80s, when the systems were less secure, on a statistic from income tax returns that was attended by a new developer, highly efficient in developing direct consultations the database, and in less than 3 minutes, he generated the report on the requested information. Fortunately, before sending the information to the minister, someone with enough authority suspected something was wrong when the total reported gross margin exceeded the country’s GDP. A brief consultation allowed proving that the excess came from a single return that had an exorbitant amount in the original field. That person ordered to remove that return. The developer asked if he was sure he had to eliminate it, and the official insisted it was an order. Then the developer removed the return from the database, not just from the statistics.

Here are some situations to illustrate. Are there fictitious…or not?

• Imagine that in an administration, an adaptation of CIIU Code is in use for the main economic activity of the taxpayer in the registry. The number of taxpayers associated with activity 99999 “Other activities not classified” is disproportionately large, probably due to the difficulty of coding, due to the no-location of the code, intended to prevent an activity that has additional related obligations, intended to decrease the likelihood of audits, looking for lower risk activities or simple laziness. In response, someone in the business area commands to block that code to prevent its use. The consequences could be predictable process: taxpayers coded under code 99999 remain under the same code until today; and, interestingly, since the date of blockade, early childhood education centers increased significantly./ms_list_item]

Imagine that in another administration, implementing a new information regime caused complaints from several taxpayers because the validations implemented to receive the data reject records due to the absence of fields or because they do not meet a set of formatting rules, or because they are out of domain. Then an administrator commands to lift the validations and accept the records as they arrive with the intention of avoiding confrontations with taxpayers, no longer be subject to fines, and then claiming that errors will be corrected later. The consequence is that the information that led to the decision was never subsequently fixed, or corrected.  The information kept arriving and nobody cared about whether the entries were correct or not. The quality, far from improving, only worsened because informants just had to worry about meeting the formal requirement and had no encouragement or punishment to try to improve data quality. At the end, when it was finally decided to use the information, it turned out to be of such low quality that it could not be used. Someone discovered this and proposed to start validating the fields or stop asking for the information, and the result was a futile process, consuming resources of the administration and the taxpayers. An administrator then proposed to leave things as they were, because some data may be useful since not all the data that are there would be bad.

• A minister, very upset about the delay in the processing of personal income tax returns and consequently, a delay in the refunds of withholdings, which was generating understandable discomfort in public opinion, decided to listen without much analysis the recommendation of someone the software industry to implement fully an electronic filing system based on PDF forms. By putting the issues into production, things did not work as expected, there were many problems in the operation, insufficient validations and the system was not designed to incorporate the captured data to the existing settlements. The effect was a delay in processing the returns, far longer than what they already had.

• In an administration, when they implemented a new system of information, they had issues with taxpayers who had a high transaction volume registered, while everything worked fine for those with lower volume of transactions. It is easy to imagine that precisely the taxpayers with high volumes of transactions are important in the economy and therefore their discomfort is heard loud and clear. The administration decided to postpone the information regime and then modify the system so that from the following next year it would be less demanding in terms of timeliness of delivery. A few weeks later, the technical problems were solved, but the taxpayers felt that once again, things were postponed, and they were left with a slower information regime when everyone involved had made their investments to comply with the regime.

The normal democratic process imposes cyclic changes, in which it is possible that, legitimately, people with relatively minor experience arrive in the administration and its peculiarities. Here today, gone tomorrow, like in that famous song of the German group Scorpions, these are winds of change. However, the Career officials must do their part, transmit their knowledge and experience, and try to prevent the unfortunate events mentioned here from happening.

Obviously, it is self-evident: the implementation of new processes must be safe, tested, validated, and informed (and I surely could keep adding qualifying words, as if they were adjectives with more verbs in participle). Risk analysis and cost benefit, the emergency plan, the ability to recover from failures, the contingency mechanism, the technical support plan, the training of the call center staff, and many other activities such as these should be designed and developed before and during the implementation of a new process, procedure or system. It is obvious, of course, and yet….

Greetings and Godspeed

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