In America, a great deal in business and life is built on trust.
An interesting system, where bending the rules is very easy, but you are only given the right to do so once in a lifetime.
Once caught, you end up on the list of unreliable people, and you simply can’t approach the issue of trust a second time – for example, you won’t be hired for a decent job, the bank won’t give you a loan, the insurance company won’t offer fair terms, and you won’t be able to rent a decent apartment at a reasonable price, etc. You will need to live by the rules for a long while and slowly in order to rebuild trust, gradually bringing your karma back to a normal level. Or you could move to the right neighborhood with others like you 🙂
I find it a very beautiful system. However, it requires a certain organization of information systems and processes, which the government needs to mature to support. In Russia, for example, even the civil registry database isn’t centralized, nor are the databases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Checking if someone has any misdemeanors turns into hundreds of requests across regions into different databases, then often requires manual aggregation of all this together. The process is so “expensive” in terms of resources and relatively slow that only insiders or quasi-insiders use it.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 