Mr Chen Lingshen has highlighted the counter-productive outcomes of the "clunky, unintuitive, error-prone and erratic" IT system jointly used by the Social Service Offices and Family Service Centres (FSCs) (Introduce tech in social service sector ethically, July 19).

Instead of greater efficiency, administrative work has increased exponentially after the introduction of the IT system.

With this increase, are FSCs still adhering to the 20 per cent allocated for administrative work from public funds and donations during the last four years?

I wonder if the Auditor-General's Office audits this aspect of FSCs' work. A knock-on effect of increased administrative work is reduction in time for client work.

Social service officers need to spend more time fulfilling the administrative key performance indicators as they are made to feel that they are evaluated more on their administrative work rather than their case work. Inadvertently, client servicing suffers.

This situation sounds familiar to what teachers were experiencing. Just as the Ministry of Education is finding solutions to reduce the time teachers spend on administrative tasks to have more time to teach, the Ministry of Social and Family Development should relieve social workers of administrative work so that more time can be devoted to working with clients.

Mr Chen also made a pertinent point about the planned use of artificial intelligence (AI) for surveillance in a youth institutional facility to predict instances of possible aggression. I agree with him that this is disturbing as some studies have found that bias may be inherent in such software.

For example, a 2016 ProPublica investigation in the United States concluded that "the data driving an AI system used by judges to determine if a convicted criminal is likely to commit more crimes appeared to be biased against minorities". (Smithsonian.com)

The ethics and efficacy of such use of technology should first be thoroughly examined by all the stakeholders concerned, including family members of the youth, before vast sums of money are invested in its implementation.

Tang Siew Ngoh