Oh... no... um... no...please...oh, you did...
I worked in transportation software, for a Large Global Company that does a little bit of everything technology-wise. I wouldn't have to predict this as an outcome, as I would know that it would happen, even without knowing the systems involved.
Many systems are just plain outdated, backed by outdated pseduo-database or flat-file technologies that were homegrown. NULL? Yeah right.
Then, many systems were made to talk to those systems. They, in turn, might expect or need different data. They, themselves, were probably built a while ago by companies that might be technology creators, or might might be consultants with government ties. If the latter, you probably have some rigid kind of rules and practices.
These talk to more modern systems that do things like "hey, we can identify someone by their plate and just ticket/fine/invoice them. We just need to know who owns the vehicle. Oh, and state law says we have to send the registered owner the first invoice and the registered address, and then we can skip-trace past that with future notices."
Great! We need to use the registration info anyway! How do we do this? We build a system to take inbound infraction information. That system we build to identify the plate - mostly automatically, because machines are less expensive than people. (please note: NULL is pretty easy to OCR under real-world conditions). Now, we just need to 'dumb down' that information for the interfaces to the company system that talks to the government system that in turn maintains the government data originally used to - in isolation - invoice and track registration. Oh, everything is a pipe-delimited string cut off at 32 bytes and some other wonky stuff, but that's cool it's legacy and has worked rock-solid for 32 years...
BTW, 'we' were smart enough to know that not all infractions can have an image we can identify. So we store these with NULL or some integral value like NOPLATE. Also, some people have TEMP plates and we can't send those on. However, we need to report on all of this, so we understandably store this data.
Whether we sent "NULL" and it matched somewhere along the way, or an update back made its way into our system...well... let's just say "OK then".
And someone comes along with the bright idea of having "NULL" or "TEMP" or "NOPLATE" etc. and is genuinely shocked. I can understand the shock - surely this shouldn't happen... but as soon as you think about my (very simplified) example, you realize the inevitability of it.
I can only imagine the bureaucracy of trying to fix it...No joke, at that point I'd probably retain a lawyer, one who preferably knows the governor or commissioner or something.