Like piles of inventory in a production facility, backlogs of paperwork indicate bottlenecks in service delivery and a possible lack of integration both internally and with complementary services.
For a host of reasons — old age, infirmity, poverty, the difficulty of learning English, on top of backlogs, crushing paperwork and high administrative fees — thousands of people would be unable to meet the deadline.
When it began testing a system for recording initial agreements to trade last month, it described itself as a tap-dancing gorilla.Such concerns are likely to loom larger now that the backlog of paperwork has been reduced.
The Department of Corrections staff is down to 9,241 from 9,545 two years ago, according to the treasurer's office, and because nearly all of those reductions involved civilians rather than uniformed officers, a backlog of paperwork has developed.
That last-minute approval, combined with a flood of investor demand for Treasury bills and a series of technical glitches in processing the backlog of paperwork, resulted in thousands of late payments to holders of Treasury bills that were maturing that April and May.
"I arrived just as they were putting the fires out," said Mr. Miller, who had been about to tackle a backlog of paperwork for his other job, as a funeral director, when he learned about the hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and then, into a reclaimed strip mine in his own county here in rural western Pennsylvania.
Like much of west Africa, many of the clinics and other healthcare facilities servicing the city still rely on time-consuming paper and print to coordinate operations - meaning there's often (if not usually) a large backlog of paperwork and insurance documents waiting to be dealt with.
I didn't get all my calls in to the farmers on my waiting list, I didn't make my final call to the senator on my list, and I didn't get any of the backlog of paperwork done.
Its courts are backlogged.
Immigration courts were backlogged.
Asylum claims were backlogged.
