Edge cases is where every legislatively mandated process I've ever administered has failed hard. The laws and regulations I was administering worked well for 99% of clients.
But if you were in that 1%, shit sucked, sorry.
Two examples:
1) You're a single parent working part-time as a legal secretary, and in receipt of some form of social welfare payment to ensure you and your children don't end up in hardship.
You are offered full-time hours! Yes! Except because you hit the boundaries/limits/edge cases in the legislation, your net income will only increase by $30 a week, because your income tested supplementary assistances will decrease as your earnings do.
Now, the legislation in play here, ensures social welfare and works okay for 99% of people (when I say "works okay", I mean, gives them money, and doesn't disincentivise work). But that income testing bites you as you approach the edge of the income curve.
2) You want to go hunting in a national park managed by the Dept of Conservation. The usual hunting permit requires that you only use centrefire rifles - rimfires and shotguns are totally banned (to prevent hunting of native birds, especially the tasty fruit fed kererū/kūkupa/wood pigeon[0]). However, you want to hunt red deer and chamois, with a crossbow.
The policies at the time don't account for crossbows (and this was before bow hunting was as common place as it is now). So the department defaults to "No".
In both situations, the broad rules work well for 99% of users. But for the 1% it sucks. The key to the 1% is human discretion and agency.
Good systems, whether legal, business process, or algorithmic, always allow for a human to override. Bad ones don't. "Computer says no" style.
(On the crossbows, a ranger (my Mum, I'll be honest) went into bat for the hunter in question, to determine what was needed for "no" to become "yes", and well, now there's a policy that determines the minimum draw weight for a crossbow to be considered humane - and no barbed or exploding bolts allowed! [1])
One weird edge case administrative process that worked in my (well, my partner's) favour:
The UK introducted legislation stating that people on a specific type of visa would only be eligible for permanent residence if it was issued on or before April 2010. The same legislation said, if this type of visa was issued after April 2011, it oculd only be extended to a maximum of 6 years, and then the visa holder would have to go back to their home country.
Well, there were obviously a bunch of these visas that were issued in the interim period, where the holders wouldn't be eligible for permanent residence, but if the employer company was willing to do so, could keep extending these visas indefinitely.
This seemed so baffling to us that we spoke to multiple immigration solicitors and the Home Office/UK Visas & Immigration support reps (or whatever outsourced org they were then -- Capita? Sopra Steria?) and they confirmed that this was true -- the visa could be indefinitely extended unless the government changed the rules.
The government eventually patched this bug, but IIRC, not before most such visa holders used the extra time to sort their employment situation out. (Opinion, not facts, based only on forum discussion anecdata)
> You are offered full-time hours! Yes! Except because you hit the boundaries/limits/edge cases in the legislation, your net income will only increase by $30 a week, because your income tested supplementary assistances will decrease as your earnings do.
My mother at one point made $25/mo too much for her childcare assistance because she worked some overtime. She lost her assistance for months and ended up several thousand bucks in the hole. Plus joy for me, since when parents can't afford childcare, guess who gets to do it instead? If you guessed usually the oldest kid, here's a prize!
Cheers to your mum for that! One of the trickiest parts of changing the rules in any bureaucracy or medium-to-large organization is if the org are lucky enough to still have people willing to stick their necks out to try to make things better for someone else. I admire the courage it takes to do something like she did.
Half way through your first example I was thinking it sounded a lot like New Zealand. And then, it was! In that case, it's also affected by (from numerous anecdotes on twitter et al) that a lot of case managers either don't bother, or aren't empowered to work the system for their clients.
When I was a case manager for WINZ, you tried your best, but ongoing discretionary assistance (Special Purposes Benefit, now called Temporary Additional Supplement) above a certain time period required a manager's sign-off, and then you hoped that your manager wasn't a dick.
But if you were in that 1%, shit sucked, sorry.
Two examples:
1) You're a single parent working part-time as a legal secretary, and in receipt of some form of social welfare payment to ensure you and your children don't end up in hardship.
You are offered full-time hours! Yes! Except because you hit the boundaries/limits/edge cases in the legislation, your net income will only increase by $30 a week, because your income tested supplementary assistances will decrease as your earnings do.
Now, the legislation in play here, ensures social welfare and works okay for 99% of people (when I say "works okay", I mean, gives them money, and doesn't disincentivise work). But that income testing bites you as you approach the edge of the income curve.
2) You want to go hunting in a national park managed by the Dept of Conservation. The usual hunting permit requires that you only use centrefire rifles - rimfires and shotguns are totally banned (to prevent hunting of native birds, especially the tasty fruit fed kererū/kūkupa/wood pigeon[0]). However, you want to hunt red deer and chamois, with a crossbow.
The policies at the time don't account for crossbows (and this was before bow hunting was as common place as it is now). So the department defaults to "No".
In both situations, the broad rules work well for 99% of users. But for the 1% it sucks. The key to the 1% is human discretion and agency.
Good systems, whether legal, business process, or algorithmic, always allow for a human to override. Bad ones don't. "Computer says no" style.
(On the crossbows, a ranger (my Mum, I'll be honest) went into bat for the hunter in question, to determine what was needed for "no" to become "yes", and well, now there's a policy that determines the minimum draw weight for a crossbow to be considered humane - and no barbed or exploding bolts allowed! [1])
[0]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/birds-a-...
[1]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/things-to-do/hu...