@joepie91 it exist when software has societal consequences (in France)

@raito Tell me more?

@joepie91 there's many investigation groups in the French gov: IGF (financial matters), IGAS (social / health matters), IGJ (justice matters) and they're in charge to unveil corruption, mismanagement etc.

Sometimes, they have to deal with IT systems and trying to understand what responsibility played the software in question, who wrote it, why did they write it this way, etc etc.

An interesting recent example is the mismanagement of EHPAD (aged people centers) by Orpéa with a weird accounting

@raito I'm not sure that's quite what I'm thinking of.

The problem is that a lot of procedures and policy in society were de facto delegated to software (and the people building it), and in doing so they became significantly more distributed. Often, bureaucratic procedures are now the product of interactions between different software systems, instead of deliberately specified.

This also means that each individual system no longer meets what I'll call the 'significance requirement' to be of interest to traditional investigatory bodies; each individual fuckup is too small to register. It becomes a problem of a thousand cuts, none of which *by themselves* warrant investigation.

This is why I feel there should be an investigatory body that accounts for this phenomenon and that has the necessary procedures to deal with it from a practical perspective.