$190 million?! What does the architecture consist of? A database, some forms and some integrations/api? I'm 90% sure they could have done that with free software and a good support contract with a UNIX provider for far less :/
This is a very common reaction that shows a lack of experience in dealing with scale IT systems.
You're correct that a simple DB with some forms would be cheap.
But integration tends to be crazy expense. For this sort of system, other things that also need to be covered:
1. Billing integration. Including changes to billing codes, bill (fine) printing, testing.
2. Audit integration. Because whenever money is handled, audit follows.
3. Customer support integration. Including UI for customer service, training, testing. This is often a very complex item because customer service already have a zillion systems they have to use and their training requirements are ongoing and expensive, so they want you to integrate with their existing systems instead of giving them a brand new thing, and integrate with their existing training processes, etc etc.
4. Integrate with all those hand-held readers. inc vendor compliance, testing etc.
5. Contract management. You have a contract with the government and they'd like to know that you did what you claim you did. So there's teams of people to deal with on an ongoing basis.
6. Project management. There's more than one person working on this, and a lot of complex integration requiring changes in other systems => extensive project management.
7. Ongoing changes to requirements, often conflicting. All the integration points above are moving targets, so expect that they'll have to be re-done a few times both before and after launch.
8. Arse covering. You now have a large contract with the US Government. You will sued and they will get sued (typically by whomever didn't win the contract). Vast amounts of documentation covering _everything_, including documenting the process by which documents are written => tech writers galore, plus lawyers plus lawyers.
Honestly, this is barely scratching the surface. I haven't even touched the (expensive) work before the contract is even signed.
FWIW in case you wanted to format the list HN does not really support markup, so you need a blank line between list items so they get displayed as separate paragraphs rather than folded into a single one.
Oops. Understood. It's just I've seen other countries with similar projects do a lot better with less, but I guess everything is custom for a particular situation.
The really sad thing is that it's not humanly possible for one, or two or even just five people to do all of this, unless they were all like 19 or something, and then not for very long.
You literally do need all those departments that have the applied knowledge to do what they do well. Voila, $200M.
20+ years ago I was working for a company that provided systems for secure printing of checks (including payroll checks) and direct deposit notifications. One of the things suggested as a possible enhancement was the ability to email people's direct deposit notifications to them, and I got the assignment to research it.
On a technical basis, it's trivial - you already have the data stream that's going to be sent to the printer, generating a PDF wasn't going to be an enormous roadblock (though it wouldn't have been completely trivial as the source data was PCL not PS - did you know that there was handling for that in Ghostscript, at least on the commercially-licensed side?). Encryption of PDFs also possible, either with separately-licensed open source tools or with some closed-source commercial alternatives. Even ignoring the possibility of email being intercepted in transit, encryption would have been a requirement due to the risk of someone walking up to an unattended desk and simply checking that attached PDF for someone's pay info.
The killer? The infrastructure required to assign and allow people to change their passwords including management, training, etc.. By the time you've built that, you're a chunk of the way to simply providing the payroll information within an online HR system instead.
Like the old trope about the first man on Mars being a technician for an unreliable rover, the bulk of the work and cost isn't always where you'd think it would be.
Someday you'll work for a government and have to provide a support contract, and that first one will be woefully, absurdly underpriced. Your second one will answer the question you just asked here - why does interacting with the government cost so much money?
