I recently got a letter from Kawasaki City saying thanks to some changes such as the income limit being removed, we now qualify for 10,000 JPY per month in child-care allowance. That's great. And you can even apply for it online. Even better.
Can someone please help me understand the logic here though?
- I need to apply for it although now basically everyone qualifies. Even if there were still limitations, they have all the information they need.
- I can log in via MyNumber portal and apply for it online and yet I need to provide all information about myself and my family members one by one. Again, they have all the information already. It's literally all in my juminhyo.
- I need to register a bank account for the child-care allowance. I already registered one through the MyNumber portal. What was that for then?
- When you register your bank account information, it's all free text from the bank name to the branch. That could easily be drop downs and auto-complete against a verified database of banks just like when online banking.
- When entering your email address, it automatically capitalizes the first letter. Doesn't really matter for email addresses but hey, someone programmed it in a way that if there is a capital letter in the email address field, it gives you an error.
I really appreciate the effort that cities and the government are making. I am a fan of Taro Kono (despite all the MyNumber hiccups).
But, who is involved in the planning of these things? The things above seem so basic that anybody should be able to notice it and say "hold up, this doesn't make much sense, does it?"
by T0ky0_bread