This is one of those things that make even a former civil servant crazy. It is the utter incompetence of the information technology personnel in the Canadian federal government.
A misnamed entity called Service Canada is responsible for managing Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security revenue collection and payments. Service Canada has a website where one is supposed to be able to do such things as review contribution records, estimate pension or such simple things as update an address or telephone number. One has to wonder however, what sort of warped minds designed the website to ensure that most of the links lead to “service unavailable error messages.
Our federal government dreamt-up something called an e-Pass which is required before you can access personal information. On the surface, it’s not such a bad idea. Users can re-quest an e-Pass online and will be mailed, at their last known address, a code to activate a pass. The fun begins when the user tries to log on using the e-Pass. The first error message will be one saying the e-Pass internet security certificate is invalid. I guess e-Pass is so concerned with blocking users from its site that it hasn’t time to keep its own security certificate up-to-date.
More than likely, the next error message the user will get will tell you the government doesn’t recognise the internet browser being used. This morning I was directed from Safari (version 3 supported, not version 4) to Firefox (all versions supported, but rejected, I’m guessing because Firebox recently issued an upgrade to improve security) to Explorer (all versions supported, but rejected, I’m guessing again because Microsoft had just installed a security upgrade. Ah - but you can proceed with Microsoft at your own risk! Nice of e-Pass to leave things to the software that is home to almost all the security breaches on the internet while ignoring everything other software had done to improve security. But then Stephen Harper did almost wet his pants when got the shake hands with Bill Gates.
When you finally are logged-in to e-Pass, AND if you have already registered for a separate Service Canada pass code, you will (maybe I was just lucky) be admitted to the Service Canada website (more later, but it could take the gold medal for atrocious design) where presumably you can look up your account and make changes to your contact information. This morning, I can view my lifetime CPP contributions, but I am not allowed to see the address they have for me on my file. For another account I am managing as power-of-attorney, i can view an address but not change it. For four months now (and I don’t know for how long before I tired it) the site gathers the new address information and validates the address by matching it with the postal code BUT it will not allow the user to save the change. ”This service is temporarily unavailable“ and has been for months. AGGRRHHH!!! I telephoned Service Canada about this in December 2008 and was informed it was aware the function wasn't working but to check back because ti’s very important. Yea, right.
The website design leaves everything to desire. It is overloaded with text, the only obvious link buttons being to Conservative party propaganda items. Such useful and important links as accessing a personal account are buried in long lists of text or, worse, in paragraphs of nearly incomprehensible text obviously written by a team of salaried lawyers with little real work. You have to find and click on the link to access your account, then another search for the link to acknowledge you will use e-Pass to access the account, then a link to enter the e-Pass ID and password, then a link to acknowledge the last time the e-Pass was used was by you. Then, if you are lucky, you are passed back to Service Canada and presented with several screens of fine print warning of the risks of using the internet to access your account; risks you have to accept with another mouse click (has anyone ever read the warning text except the lawyers who wrote it?) before you can proceed. Finally you get back to the home page where you resume the search for the link to the function you want to perform. That’s when the fun of bumping into the ”service temporarily unavailable“ error messages. Or pages revealing that the function cannot be accessed because Service Canada will (note future text) be updating its site on May 23 (2008 or 2009 or??).
No doubts there are hundreds of information technology personnel labouring (not) in Ottawa and elsewhere to guarantee the federal websites delivers as little service as possible. They have had time to re-make every government website in CPC blue colours (will a whole new team be hired to remake the site in Liberal red after the next election?) but they, apparently, have not taken a moment to make the government’s internet services user friendly or even functional. The complete and utter failure is a disgrace to the public service. Unfortunately, the incompetence is unlikely to be rectified by a change in government.
