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Social Security wins worst agency title in Mexico!

by Pat Garcia | January 10, 2009 at 01:40 pm

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A well deserved title, I have had to make some "urgent' paperwork and appointments that takes months to be taken care of. I hope this contest serves as an incentive to improve their service.

MEXICO CITY - Here was a contest no Mexican bureaucrat wanted to win.

A months-long quest to identify the most nightmarish examples of Mexico's famously nightmarish red tape ended Thursday with a verdict: The nation's Social Security agency.

President Felipe Calderon bestowed the dubious honor on the federal agency as part of a contest to find the country's "most useless tramite," or bureaucratic process.

MEXICO CITY — To get life-saving medicine for her son, Cecilia Velazquez embarks each month on a bureaucratic odyssey. First, two government doctors have to sign off on the prescription. Next, four bureaucrats must stamp it. Last, she has to present it (in quadruplicate) to a hospital dispensary.

The process takes at least four days and sometimes as many as 15. Since her son has a hereditary immune-system deficiency that could make an infection fatal, she said she asked God to keep him well when he had to go without his medicine.

She once complained to the government agency that runs the hospital where her 7-year-old son, Diego Emilio, is treated for his illness. But the comptroller's office told her the procedure "just is that way."

I remember a famous Mexican comedian Hector Suarez playing the sketch of a bureaucratic public official asking for "your grandma's death certificate and your dog's rabies vaccine certificate" to get a driver's license!

The Mexican government launched a competition Thursday to find the worst examples of inefficiency within the bureaucratic machine. The initiative is asking people to submit the most outrageous examples of inefficiency and corruption they have experienced when dealing with officials and government agencies in Mexico.

The effort is being overseen by la Secretaría de la Función Pública, and the "winners" will be announced in December. According to the daily newspaper La Jornada, foreigners as well as Mexicans can submit their tales of exasperation and dissatisfaction with red tape in the country.

Source: latimesblogs.latimes.com