"penalty of perjury"

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When I was filling out the health insurance application today, it said that making false statements could be punished by $25000 fine and jail under "penalty of perjury". However, the insurance agency has made @ least two errors on my case thus far (and i think they were pretty significant ones). And I find it hard to imagine anyone got fined, sent to jail, or anything like that. Not even an apology.

What examples have you heard about someone getting fined or sent to jail for wrong statements on legal documents, or something like that?

In real life, never. And frankly, these things annoy me as well.

When I was a young girl, I was a medical secretary for a number of years. It seemed to me that I was the only person around me who took accuracy seriously. I learned in college that I would be liable for incorrect information on a patient's medical record, not just the treating physician. It really causes problems when you leave things wrong. I recall once having to help my boss write a long statement for a young man whose previous doctor misdiagnosed him with asthma. Now he wanted to play sports and wasn't allowed, even though he had no actual breathing problems.

These days, I notice all kinds of mistakes in documents because some sloppy or stupid person has not bothered to do things properly or was in too big of a rush to make sure the information was correct. Lucky for them, most other people don't seem to care either, so people aren't held accountable.

Maybe ShortFat and I should go into the consulting business and make recommendations for these sloppy documents.

Yes I think mostly it's an idle threat. In many cases they probably couldn't even prosecute if the client had reasonable grounds to claim that what they'd said was true "to the best of their knowledge and belief." And of course there's always the question "how would they know that was incorrect?" - although the answer isn't always clear. Those threats are designed to discourage people from making outlandishly fraudulent statements, not to get people executed for failing to dot an "i" or cross a "t." But I get very hung up on them myself. I take forms very literally and have trouble judging when to allow myself the luxury of a slightly wrong answer and when to try to play it safe.

And they do indeed make a lot of mistakes when they design forms. Even when they do a rewrite of the form they often fail to correct their errors, or they introduce new ones. It's like Microsoft Windows - multiple revisions over decades, yet it's still got bugs that have been in there since the first version. It also reminds me of an exam I took at school (supposedly the best school in the city), for which the question sheet had been very crudely photocopied and was quite illegible in many places. It was so bad that they had to send a teacher in with the original document, to tell us what it said. One particularly illegible part turned out to say "untidyness and poor legibility will be penalised." Even the teacher laughed.

Neurotypicals don't get our problems so much. They're more alive to context, so they're likely to know why the people who designed the form asked what they did, and they can second-guess whether an error would matter or not. They more often know what the interrogator is really looking for, so they don't get so hung up on the exact details. They know what the interrogator cares about and where it's OK to just think of a number and write it down. So it's very useful to us to find a neurotypical who has such "wisdom of bureaucracy" at their fingertips. Of course we're the poor sods who are signing the form where it says "I understand that I can be shot for deviation from the perfect truth," so we need a degree of trust in that person, that they're on our side and that they're as competent as they try to appear to be. And personally I have trouble trusting anybody as much as that.