It'd be lovely if articles like this named the people responsible for actually building the systems. It's almost certainly never a government department.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.
Actually this was developed by the government, in a meaningful sense, but it seems like it's Entrust (more or less inevitably) and Accenture who are the outsourced parts.
So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)
All software is going to have edge cases, no matter how good the contractor is. The decision to not have contingencies to manually handle reasonable edge cases is entirely on the government.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.