The Documentation Tax

By Burt Brooks, Founder & CEO, PathAble

I named this company after a complaint. People Over Paperwork was not a marketing exercise. It was the sentence I had been saying, with increasing irritation, for most of twenty years in human services.

So let me be precise about what the complaint actually is, because "there is too much paperwork" is a lazy version of it and I hear the lazy version constantly.

The Question Nobody Asks

The question is not how much documentation exists. It is who the documentation is written for.

Sit with a direct support professional at the end of a shift and read what they are filling out. Almost none of it is addressed to the next person who will support that individual. It is addressed to a funder, an auditor, a licensing body, a compliance reviewer. It is written in a vocabulary that exists to survive a review, and it is structured around the categories a payer reimburses rather than the things a person actually did that day.

The result is a peculiar kind of waste. The most detailed record we keep about a person's life is largely unreadable by the people who share it with them.

A DSP who wants to know how someone's morning usually goes does not read the file. They ask a coworker. Everybody knows this. Nobody says it in a meeting.

It Is a Tax, and Someone Pays It

I use the word tax deliberately. A tax is a cost extracted from an activity, and the thing being taxed here is direct support.

Every hour spent documenting is an hour not spent with a person. That is arithmetic, not opinion. In a sector where staff are underpaid and turnover is brutal, we have quietly decided that a meaningful fraction of the most human job in the economy will be spent typing.

And the tax is regressive in a way that bothers me. The burden falls heaviest on the lowest paid workers in the building. An executive director does not do the daily notes. The person earning the least does the most of it, and they are also the person whose time with the individual is the actual service being purchased.

I do not think anybody chose this. Nobody sat in a room and decided direct support should be forty percent clerical. It accumulated the way the accommodations staircase accumulates, one reasonable requirement at a time, each added by someone solving a genuine problem, with no one accountable for the total.

Why I Am Careful About the AI Answer

This is the point where someone in my position is supposed to say that AI will absorb the documentation burden, and I do build AI tools, so you should discount what follows accordingly.

But I want to name the trap, because I watch people walk into it.

If you automate the production of documentation without changing who it is written for, you have not fixed anything. You have made it cheaper to generate paperwork that still nobody reads. The likely result is not less documentation. It is more, because the constraint that kept it in check was the cost of writing it.

That is the failure mode I would bet on if we are careless. Volume goes up, usefulness stays flat, and the DSP's day is no better because now they are reviewing generated notes instead of writing them.

There is also a version of this that erases the person. Documentation is not only compliance. Somewhere inside those notes is the only written record that a human being had a Tuesday. If we hand the whole thing to a system optimizing for billing categories, we will produce a perfect audit trail describing nobody.

The useful question is not what can be automated. It is what the record should say if we were writing it for the next person who walks into that individual's life. Answer that first, then automate toward it. Doing it in the other order is how organizations end up with an expensive platform their staff route around, which is a pattern I have written about in why direct support staff are not using the tech that could help them.

The Handoff Again

Documentation is, at bottom, a handoff problem. It exists so that what one person knows survives into the next shift, the next provider, the next stage of someone's life.

Judged that way, most of it fails, and it fails in exactly the way everything else in this series fails. Each individual requirement is defensible. The person writing the note is doing their job. The auditor asking for it is doing theirs. And the thing the whole apparatus was supposed to accomplish, which is that knowledge about a human being travels with them, does not happen.

It is the same gap a student falls into between school and adult services. It is the same gap a family falls into looking for services in a new state. Every station works. Nothing survives the trip between them.

If I could change one thing this year, it would not be the volume. It would be the addressee. Write the note to the next person who will support this individual. You would be astonished how much of the current form falls away once you know who you are writing to.

The Documentation Tax

The Question Nobody Asks

It Is a Tax, and Someone Pays It

Why I Am Careful About the AI Answer

The Handoff Again

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