The UK government's Low Value Purchase System is a waste of time

My spouse did business at a collector show in Illinois years ago. We filed some sales tax thing, as we collected sales tax (as we were told to do) and remitted it. Did that for... 2 years, IIRC, then didn't do that show again. We got letters threatening that we would be penalized if we didn't fill out the form and remit our collected tax. There was no option to say 'nothing'. I mean... we did one year - put 0. Then we stopped the business. Had multiple emails, physical letters, and hours on the phone being bounced around between places to say "we don't run the business any more - we're not operating". And... no one seemed to have a way to decidedly stop these. We'd get "OK" then... 6 months later got a letter saying "you owe $x and penalties for failing to file"... I was slightly concerned about driving through Illinois at some point, thinking they might have an arrest warrant out for one of us. It took 2 years of not getting these to finally believe we're not in their system any more. Similar story for New Jersey, but it wasn't quite as bad. Still required a lot of manual work.

I work in UK Government and the problem is that procurement depts are so afraid of awarding tenders to dodgy suppliers they add so many layers of bureaucracy that it prevents local or more innovative contractors. The rules are much more flexible for low value tenders <£30k but it is a very exclusionary system.

Please realise there are many civil servants and local government officers that realise the system is overly bureaucratic and are encouraging procurement teams to change their processes, but it is mostly dictated by national legislation.

I think allowing mayoral authorities to flex their procurement systems for innovative solutions would be a good testing ground. The whole point of devolution is to allow areas to spend money locally how they see fit and it can become a bit of a laboratory for new, risky ideas that - if they pay off - can be copied by other places.

Their medium value purchase system is a waste of time too - I work for a small business that does government contracts and you have to pay the government just for the pleasure of bidding for contracts.

Then every bid has it's own unique weird things, where often you are told who you are bidding against and sometimes even how much the government wants to pay!

The scorecards are often weird, will do things like ask you to write mini-essays with word limits where you get penalised for being over the word count, or where 20% of the bid points are based on a combination of diversity and impact on the local community/environment rather than on who will do the job best at the lowest price.

The entire process is completely broken, and has no reference to good/standard procurement processes in the private sector.

"The system is working as intended". I once attended an official seminar given by the government procurement department, to an audience of (mostly) government department people with purchase authority. The subject of which was how to construct your invitations to tender such that only the largest 3-4 suppliers could possibly respond. "Solves the problem of having to consider 20-30 suppliers and review their submissions". I'm so glad that was early on in my career (as a vendor).

If you are on a framework, that gives prospective public sector buyers assurance that certain basic checks/ due-dilligence about your business has already been done. So even if you have not made a sale to a public sector entity in recent times but are on a framework then makes sense to keep your details up-to-date...

I get that the tax man needs to be paid, but what possible justification could there be for

1. demanding for this data monthly, rather than quarterly or yearly; and

2. demanding it via an annoying bespoke process rather than as an entry in the business's regular tax filing or some other pre-existing regular paperwork that small businesses are already submitting?

Just an anecdote on UK local government tech incompetence: I received a ticket “Failing to comply with a prohibition on certain types of vehicle” from Hackney council. Initially I thought my car had been cloned as I haven’t driven for months, but either a person or an AI had misread my car number plate. It was all just such a waste of time, especially navigating the Ai designed to annoy you into paying.

> So the GCA are wasting everyone's time and do not track how annoying it is.

I am 80% sure that someone is aware how much waste there is, but nobody wants to / is able to change the process. Just like many other organizations.