The Costs of Bureaucracy
Coincidentally, just as the comment thread on Surveys of Expats about Life in Kazakhstan turned to bureaucracy, I came across a report on the automatization of government services for people and e-gov.
According to research (I believe done by the Center for Services for the Population or TSON), over a period of ten months in 2010, 5,815,991 people went to a TSON center to receive some kind of government service. For those who don’t live in Kazakhstan, I should explain that TSON is a centralized center where citizens can receive a wide variety of services from the Ministry of Justice–registering property, getting a marriage certificate, adoption, registering births and deaths. As far as I know, a number of common services like getting a driver’s license, paying taxes, registering for pensions or disability claims, or opening a business, are not covered by TSON however.
Overall 164 documents were required to receive 71 different kinds of services at TSONs throughout the country.. On average, each service from the government therefore requires 2.3 documents, which may include original documents like a birth certificate or marriage certificate or Social Security Card, or a form, or some kind of letter. Many of these forms and documents are multiple pages long of course.
Of those 164 documents required for services from TSON, half (84) came from government agencies–which means that acquiring those documents doubtless required other documents.So we might safely assume that on average, citizens needing services from TSON must handle on average 4.6 documents (84 documents from government agencies * 2 documents needed to get those 84 documents + 80 documents NOT from government agencies = 332, divided by 71 services).
Overall the study concluded that over ten months, around 62 million documents were handled by TSON. Which divided by 5 815 991 citizens, comes to 10.66 documents per person, far higher than the average I calculated above. Incidentally, that also comes to 200,000 documents a day handled by 316 TSON centers–632 per center per day.
I would like to have calculated this out by how many trees are used up in the service of all this bureaucracy, but unfortunately there is no way to distinguish how many pages these documents are. Nor is it clear how many documents are presented in original and how many in copies. However, if we assume that each document is one page (conservative) and we also assume that each document is copied (to balance it out, since some documents may be shown and not copied), sources seem to indicate that one tree makes around 8,333.3 sheets of paper. So roughly, 24 trees a day (200,000 documents/8333 sheets) die in order to provide documentary services. 62 million documents per 10 months comes to 74 400 000 per year. Or around 8,928 trees a year (by our rather rough estimate). By contrast, Zhasil El planned to plant 51,000 trees in 2010 so 17% of their work is just feeding the bureaucracy of TSON. Note that the rest of the government uses its fair share of paper.
So the environmental costs of bureaucracy are quite high. This analysis is quite amateur of course and I would love to hear from people better versed in statistics (and with better information about the usage of paper in the government).
In a separate post I plan to look at some rough estimates of how much budget money is spent processing these documents and how much worker productivity is lost collecting and submitting these documents.
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Let me first say that in the past few years, the quality of services and organiations at TSONs, at least in Almaty, has gone up quite a bit. They now issue numbered tickets, have different services clearly divided by windows, and are generally the fastest and easiest to use of all government offices in Kazakhstan.
Regarding the document counts… I think you’re really overestimating things.
164 documents required for 71 services, but it’s very likely that those documents largely consist of 1) RNN 2) Passport/Residency. Those two are government issued, but on a one-time basis. Other commonly-used documents at a TSON include the passport for an apartment and/or a power of attorney from the owner, if the resident of an apartment or home is not the owner, and the registration book for that domicile– an official document showing who is registered to live at that address. That’s also a document created one time for each address, and then updated to reflect current information.
It is very likely that the study is not counting unique documents, but is counting every individual instance of a TSON handling a common document, like an RNN, as a document handled. In fact, if you go from window to window in a TSON and use the RNN and passport at each window, that is also likely counted as one instance of document handling per document per window per day– many transactions require repeat trips, and not all require TSON to hold your document for you.
These are all good points. And to be honest, I haven’t had a lot of experience at TSON itself. However, I have found in general for many services (not only government services but also at shops and employers) that if I am required to show my ID or RNN, I often have to bring a copy, or they make a copy. In some cases, it needs to be a notarized copy. So even though you are right that most of the time you are showing your ID or passport and your RNN, they are still creating more paper.
And yes, the TSONs itself are vast improvements over the old ZAGS. And in general bureaucracy is much better in Kazakhstan than it was even a few years ago. I remember the first time I came and had to register with OVIR (Migration Police). We literally had to go from office to office. Now you just go to one or two windows and hand in the documents.
Having spent quite a lot of time in OVIR lately, I can say that it’s only a little bit better. Theoretically it’s arranged like TSON with windows, but there’s no triage, no set schedules. The signs that describe what each window is for are too small to be read except from very close to them, and by the time anyone arrives at a window (as much as half an hour to an hour after the scheduled time) there is often a “line” (and I use the term loosely) 6-12 people deep at each window. The usual queue behaviors apply: people walk to the front of the line and ask who is last (even with a line of people streaming away from the window, off down the hall).
Yes, more paper documents are being created, but that in itself is not unusual for the area. I’d look at having more windows, organizing lines better, making sure that information is clearly posted (in many cases the information about what documents you need in OVIR is unreliable, varies from person to person, and is only given orally) and that employees are reliable and trustworthy, before looking at trying to cut down the amount of paper.
Still, progress 🙂
And my personal pet peeve for OVIR and the Tax Committee especially, is the game of only telling you what you need one document at a time. So you come with document A, and they say, “Great, now you need document B.” You come with A and B, and they say, “OK now you need document C.” and so on…
No idea why they do this. Is it fun for them? Or are they just making it up as they go along? Clear and widely available directions would be great. e-gov.kz has vastly improved in this direction by the way, with lists of documents and links to forms and blanks.
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