Long processes in government offices lead to the weakening of governance and development

As a third world country, Afghanistan experiences many challenges and problems in the governance process. This country, which has experienced less political stability throughout its long history, has therefore experienced few governments that has advanced with the thought of development and pushed governance towards standardization and modernization.

One of the biggest and most important challenges that governance in Afghanistan is dealing with and has never found a way to improve is the very long and tiring administrative processes in government offices. It can be seen that dozens of steps are taken to do a simple administrative task. In this long process, doing a very minor and unimportant task requires a large number of forms and correspondence, which eventually becomes a thick and heavy file. Besides that, in every step and every stage, many employees are involved who have to do different things and sign many papers so that the work is transferred to the next stage.

This very long process can lead to many damages and negative consequences. First, long work processes take a lot of time. For example, it takes at least ten working days to receive a civic services notebook from the municipal offices. During the time, which includes writing the petition, signing it, going to the revenue office and receiving another ruling above the next office, checking and evaluating in the computer system, issuing bank tariffs, transferring cash to the bank account, receiving the white notebook, filling the notebook, inserting the data in the computer system and issuing and distributing the notebook, other unjustified interruptions are also created which make the work longer. For example, sometimes one of the employees is not present in the office to sign the documents and this may delay the work for one or more days. Sometimes the work that needs to be done at that moment is postponed to the following days and causes another interruption. Sometimes the documents are completely missing and no one is responsible to search for them and solve the citizens’ problems. Sometimes an employee who is angry under the high pressure of work, leaves the office violently and angrily or closes the office gate and refuses to continue working.

Second, long processes, besides wasting a lot of time, also put a lot of costs on the government departments. This means that the longer the processes are and the more time they take, the more financial, human, physical and technical resources will be consumed and the public budget of the government will be higher.

In addition, long processes lead to overcrowding of customers in government offices. Due to the fact that administrative processes take a lot of time, before the problems and requests of previous clients are dealt with, more new clients come and make even more crowd

  This is while if the required human and technical resources are considered and besides the procedures are shortened, the employees are also managed in such a way that time wasting is avoided and the official work time is spent on doing official work and handling requests. Clients and citizens will be allocated, without doubt, the waste of time of citizens and government offices will be avoided and the cost will be reduced.

On the other hand, the longer the administrative procedures are, the greater the extent of administrative corruption and bribery. Corrupt employees, using the opportunity that arises in different administrative layers, force clients who are tired of their work to be prolonged in some way to buy time by paying bribes and go through the administrative procedures sooner and to reach other life problems.

Therefore, if we consider this problem at the whole level; A thing that can be clearly seen in almost all government offices, the result that is obtained is nothing but that in the long run, long and time-consuming and expensive processes, in the end, the entire process of development and governance will be seriously disrupted and the process of progress will be more than It slows down.

But what is actually seen is that until now, every government and military that has been in power in this country has not been able or has not had the courage and will to think about improving governance and find a way to reduce Boring bureaucracy and expense on administrative processes to solve one of the labyrinthine problems of this country.

There are a number of offices that have closed the way for clients to enter the offices. In order to avoid overcrowding, these offices receive only the necessary documents in the entrance of the offices and specify another time for them to receive their documents. In some of these offices, only those who manage to go inside and solve their problems, who have communication channels at their disposal and use these channels to do their work, but people who do not have friends and acquaintances with the employees of that office, have to spend days and may spend weeks walking in the corridors of waiting until a window opens and their documents reach them again. However, there are a number of departments that do not set a time for processing documents, and there is no authority that can answer questions and be responsible for handling the problems and complaints of people and citizens. In this case, it is possible that the employees who work inside the branches and away from the eyes of the clients, with lack of work and extensive negligence, deliberately do not want to go through the received documents and return them to the citizens at the necessary time and open a knot in their work.

Administrative mistakes of employees are another problem that citizens face in government offices. It has been seen that an office made mistakes several times in the preparation and administrative procedures of documents and faced many challenges to the people. These mistakes can be seen especially in the NSIA and issuing of paper ID cards. In many cases, the employees of this office write people’s names in identity cards with very gross and strange mistakes; on the one hand, they make citizens’ official and identity documents incomplete, and on the other hand, they involve citizens in a very long name correction process and waste a lot of time. It is hoped that a solution will be found in this regard and the administrative processes will be shortened.