Comment This is not a government issue. This is common. (Score 1) 42
If you are a consultant and see "enterprise" databases made by Fortune 500 companies, you'll see a lot of this "schema rot," due to patching, organizational disfunction, merging of data from old (and incompatible) legacy systems, lack of written documentation and version control, and chaos left behind by past hiring of low-cost contractors who neither understand database design nor the business domain the database should be modeling. You'll also often find that only a few people have been there long enough to "know where the skeletons are buried," and they're so busy trying to fight fires and create convoluted reports from bad data that they can't ever find the resources to address those issues.