Are You The Prime Minister of New Zealand?

In the category of bureaucracy gone mad, when I worked at a payment card company, we had to perform Know Your Customer checks to see if any users were Russian oligarchs or convicted felons or otherwise slippery folk. One check was for PEPs, meaning politically exposed persons—those who might be at elevated risk of being bribed or paying a kidnapping ransom or otherwise using our innocent little kid’s card in ways it wasn’t intended for.

We dutifully did these checks for every customer. They were mostly automated, but some had to be done by hand, including calling potential PEPs that our KYC service flagged as possible concerns.

Then one day disaster struck, in the form of an election result in New Zealand. They’d elected a new prime minister, and his name was…

…John Smith.

We had more than a few John Smiths in our database, and every single one got flagged as a potential PEP. We tried to find ways around it for a few days, but eventually we had to phone every single John Smith we had. So we had dozens of these conversations:

“Hello, is this John Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Great! I’m XXX and I’m phoning to check something about your card. Can you tell me [deep breath] whether you are the Prime Minister of New Zealand?”

[Long silence.]

“No, I’m an architect from Basingstoke! [Click].”