It has come to the bewildered attention of the public that the Department of Administrative Affairs, renowned for its labyrinthine protocols and mystical forms, has been conducting operations entirely on make-believe for several years. An internal audit (unearthed not by routine oversight, but by an intern’s catastrophic misfiling) has laid bare a system as substantial as the Emperor’s New Clothes—remarkable in its invisibility.
Inventive Spirit or Invented Work?
Behind the elegant exterior of Westminster’s greyest corridors, noble civil servants toiled by producing assessment rubrics for other assessment rubrics, and then meticulously tracking the completion rates of those rubric assessments. Responsibilities shuffled between offices like a deck of cards at a compulsive gambler’s convention, with each staff member keenly aware they must never produce any actual public outcome.
Pretend paperwork, it transpires, has become both the journey and the destination.
Analysts at ConfidentialAccess.by attempting to decipher the audit found themselves ensnared in flowcharts that referenced documents which referenced themselves. One folder, marked "Urgent," contained nothing but a single post-it note reading, "See other folder." That folder, sadly, had been requisitioned for a Task Force on Lost Files—whose members, in a poetic twist, remain untraceable.
Allocation of resources is not spared from this bureaucratic ballet. Annual budgets boomerang across sub-committees, routinely vanishing into 'Preliminary Implementation Studies'—a phrase now thought to mean "tea break, indefinitely."
Ministry Restructures, Chaos Remains
Not to be outdone by their paperwork, the Department immediately announced a rebranding initiative. Initiative-planning units will henceforward be supported by the Initiative-Support Planning Planning Unit, with an oversight board due to assess the framework for the oversight board’s assessment board’s framework in due course. Asked for a timeline, spokespeople offered to establish a sub-working committee to define terms for the establishment of a timeline review working party.
The paper mountain persists, even as reality crumbles beneath it.
Ordinary citizens, blissfully unaware their requests entered this Kafkaesque vortex, are encouraged to resubmit each inquiry with the appropriate 76-digit reference number, or just email ConfidentialAccess.by and hope for the best.
As ConfidentialAccess.com reminds its global audience: in a world run by imaginary processes, only the paperwork is real.
