I continue and conclude my invective against the Italian public administration and bureaucracy by reporting my last (and fiercest) battle: with INPS, the National Social Security Institute, the mammoth of the whole Italian public administration…
You may remember we looked for a nursery where to send Leo when Mathilde would have started working again some time ago (click here if you don’t remember). And in fact we found one, quite close to where we live. But when time came to send Leo there, we had a second thought. At three months Leo seemed too little and vulnerable to us to be sent in the middle of a crowd of screaming babies that were at least twice bigger than him, and we decided to hire a nanny - at least until the end of the winter.
And luckily we found a very good one, Claudia (we’ll surely dedicate a post to her soon), highly recommended by a couple of colleagues of mine who were moving to New Zealand. But when we had to formalize the contract I realized that, as her employer, I had at one point to interact with INPS. And aware of the terrible reputation that this Institute enjoys, I started trembling, fearing (anticipating) the worst. It was my colleague Jamie that - I am not sure whether maliciously or not - reassured me: “Don’t worry - she told me - it can all be done via internet; it takes no more than 10-15 minutes…”
“It can all be done via internet…”
Now, allow me to open a parenthesis here for our non-Italian followers. Not sure about official statistics, but to my knowledge (and in my experience) Italy is one of the least computerized countries in the world. I remember when, a few years ago, I was describing the electronic filing system that we used at the Bank to a friend of mine who was working at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs - who sadly confessed that at the Ministry everything (everything!) is still filed in paper. Or when at the cadastre (the land registry office) the officer on duty presented himself literally with a trolley full of papers to find out the map we requested…
Anyway, I remember that when Berlusconi took power in 2001, one of the pillars of his program was to promote in Italy what he called the three “i”: ‘inglese’ (English), ‘impresa’ (business enterprise), and, precisely, ‘informatica’ (informatics) - promising to computerize the whole public administration.
Despite a general skepticism on the whole program of the Berlusconi’s administration, that particular point seemed to me quite sharable, and, all in all, relatively easily achievable. But at that time I was already out of Italy, and soon lost track of the progress in this area.
Until when, recently, I had to deal directly with the Italian public administration again. Well, to tell the truth, the first impact was positive. In fact, all public offices in Italy have now an internet page. But this first positive impression soon revealed itself wrong. The web-page is in fact a cover, a bluff. You think you can find your answers or you can request your certificates online, but in fact you soon discover that after a few screens or beyond a certain level you can’t go further, and you need to interact with an operator. With all the previous problems of dealing with public employees…
I have plenty of examples. A recent one is when I had to request my own birth certificate. With my great surprise I discovered on the web-page of the Milan General Registry Office that I could request the certificate online. I duly completed all the necessary forms on line and submitted the request, but when I had to pay for the service, I discovered that I could not pay it online. In fact I had to call a green number. The operator of that number is not there to take your credit card details, but simply to register your request and to pass it to the General Registry Office (!). After about one week, an employee of the General Registry Office called me to verify that the request I made online was correct (!!). And finally, after another week, I was called by another operator who finally took my credit card details and processed the payment (!!!). Luckily there have not been problems with the mail service, and after only one week I received my birth certificate at home. All in all, after only one month from my initial request…
Provided this background, let’s move now back to my battle with INPS…
[It continues and finishes in the next post].
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