Public Disservice

Wasted 20 minutes today trying to reply to a National Statistics Institute (INE) on-line survey about the use of information technology.

The bureaucratic overload in this country is amazing (don't know what it's like in the UK, never had to do it) and INE has to be the worst. Apart from the sheer volume, there is the awful site and their complete inability to communicate, a total contrast to the Tax Authorities' site which anybody can cope with.

Anyway, I battled on, finding that INE's users are "aderentes" not "utentes" and that signing up is a multi-step process where the individual registers, receives a password by email, then registers the Company and has to wait for another password by post... yawn. But the most amazing part came when I hit the help button on the "aderentes" page. It gives a FAQ section which helpfully defines all sorts of unintelligible terms, in a totally unintelligible fashion! The author should be shot.

So we can now register a new company "on the spot", only to spend hours groping around in the dark when we try to run it. Maybe the Government should wave its anti-bureaucracy broom in INE's direction.

Oh, and don't forget that you can be fined for not replying to INE surveys!