Then there is red tape. For measure, the UK’s tax code comes in at 22,000 pages, more than any other country in the world. The Federation of Small Businesses estimates that a small company spends 44 hours per year on average on tax administration, at a total annual cost of around £25bn across all small enterprises.
The code itself contains numerous inefficiencies that distort work, growth and investment incentives, including cliff-edges in income tax and business valued-added tax thresholds, and transaction taxes on property and stocks. UK tax expert Dan Neidle outlines these here.
Building also requires hefty paperwork, which slows projects. As Britain Remade found, reopening a 3.3-mile train line to Portishead from Bristol took 79,187 pages of planning documents. Printed out, that’s 14.6 miles of paperwork — 4.5 times the length of the actual railway. The process has taken 16 years so far. (Construction should start soon.)
Source: The UK doesn’t have a productivity puzzle
This is the same mechanism that infects Fortune 500 bluechip manufacturing companies’ IT organizations. There are lots of subgroups dedicated to their own particular subfunction, and this sounds like a great idea on paper. Let’s have a group dedicated to, say, networking. Then the people who know networking will make their expertise available to every project, and those projects won’t need to staff up with people who understand networking. Brilliant!
Except there’s not a single IT job that can exist without at least a basic understanding of how networking works.
And firewall is separate from that.
And DNS is separate from that.
And on and on.
Every subgroup has to remind everyone else that they exist, and justify their existence by imposing extra work on every step of every project. No one will EVER say, “No, my group doesn’t need to be involved with that. That’s a small enough concern and/or low enough risk that you can handle it internally.” So every single project requires years and years of planning and execution, no matter how large or small. So a simple CRUD web site takes 3 years to work through the system.