The Washington Post has a good example of government inefficiency:
Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.
A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that's now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.
This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it's now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now
The government blames IBM, which had been working on the project. The Post says "An IBM spokesman declined to address the criticisms, saying only that the company's work on Transformation concluded in May." (Disclosure: I own some IBM stock.)
That immigration still basically runs on paper files here in 2015 helps explain in part why it's such a hassle to deal with. Where in the private sector can one spend $3 billion and 14 years on an IT project with no results and have basically no accountability?