It always seems to take awhile to get resolve an issue with a state agency. They might send you a letter that you owe them taxes. You might respond to said letter and pay the taxes. You might then receive another letter…for the same taxes you already paid.
Why is that?
The way to think about state agencies and—by proxy—your tax accounts, is that they are eventually consistent. Changes can happen to the balance of your account, but what you observe (e.g. a letter) might not accurately reflect the current balance of your account. It’s not just balances—pretty much any information that changes will take time to settle into the right places.
Part of this is run-of-the-mill bureaucracy, but these are also large scale organizations and with distributed systems. (If you think about it, even moving papers around a building or two is a network which comes with network faults). Without eventual consistency, they would be unable to serve as many users and handle the complexity in which they serve them.
Links to this note
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Hawaii Turns off Their Unemployment Insurance Website Outside of Business Hours
The Hawaii Unemployment Insurance portal becomes unavailable outside of their normal stated business hours. This can be surprising if one’s baseline assumption is that websites should always be up and their functionality doesn’t change whether it’s 9AM on a Monday or 2AM on a Saturday.