If there's anything I have learned with age it's that regulations have bizarre unintended consequences. The incentives are too numerous and too precariously balanced to muck with without tipping someone's seesaw right into a volcano.

>laborious process of filling out irrelevant paperwork is orthogonal to actually accomplishing the initial goals.

Well yes, it's designed so that a handful of teenagers can't just clone the IRS database, for example.