Here’s the lead-in to a wonderful essay by James Kilpatrick on bureaucrats, and an effective solution to many bureaucratic problems:

Language Log: Bureaucrats

« James Kilpatrick, linguistic socialist»
March 28, 2008

Bureaucrats

It’s tax season here in America and that usually leads to lots of mumbling under the breath about those “damn bureaucrats in Washington” who make up those unreadable tax forms. Several words in the English language rise to the level of making us mad and bureaucrat seems to be one of them. When our tax filing gets challenged, we blame those nasty bureaucrats at IRS. When we’re bogged down with pages of needless forms to fill out, it’s the fault of those anonymous servants of the government who are the problem. When a statute is incomprehensible, it’s the bureaucrat’s fault, even though we might better place the blame on the legislators who wrote it in the first place.

I rise today to defend those bureaucrats. Please stop hissing and booing. Let me explain why…

Be sure to read the entire essay. I’ll be posting the link, if not the entire essay, in the soon-to-come Strategies and Solutions Library. It speaks to the matter of creating a professional bureaucracy in which people are there to serve and take pride in serving well, not in corralling power for themselves and dishing out lucrative contracts for their cronies.

A Related Matter

While Kilpatrick’s essay is about the virtues of bureaucrats’ communicating in clear language, there are corporate bureaucracies that have done what they can to capitalize on bureaucrat-ese and bureaucratic-looking forms.

A prime example was a form regularly sent by an insurance company to injured workers. The company, issuer of the employers’ workers compensation insurance policy, would initially pay claims for an injured worker but then, at a point which I think was triggered by claims passing a particular dollar amount, send out this form to the worker that was formatted and worded to make it appear that it was from the state Department of Labor, and was announcing that the worker had been found ineligible for continued workers’ comp benefits. It was only at the very bottom of the form, in a sentence off in a corner, that the form was identified as coming from the insurance company.

If you’ve ever been in a situation in which you are waiting for official word from someone that has to do with your financial survival, you know that when you got something in the mail about it you probably just scanned the beginning, looking for the words telling you that you did or didn’t get what you wanted. Most people do just that, and many if not most people on workers’ comp would read the first part of that form and think they were shut out of any further benefits.

I had several clients who went through just that scenario, and I had mentioned it to a couple of state legislators back around the time my own career was fed into a bureaucratic wringer. Though I didn’t keep up with the issue, I was told that it was being addressed either in the legislature or by the Department of Labor. It was certainly a more craven example of an insurance company’s trying to pad its stockholders’ dividends by cheating poor and injured workers.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen