Only the government or lawyers (or combination of the two) would take 17 pages to say..“ (shrug) We dunno..” .
Lol! Yep, way too true. Back in the early 2000's I worked for DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency). Had an incident at a large defense contractor where five years of financial data was lost. The reason was the company was using an ancient data entry system built in the mid 1970's to enter the data. Five years prior they could no longer obtain the reel to reel storage so they installed a modern backup drive. However nobody actually ever checked the backup drive to verify it was actually backing up the data (it wasn't), just assumed, "Hey it seems to be doing something, good enough for us."
We were told all this on day one by a low level IT guy at the company. Yet it took 9 months and a couple million dollars to bring in multiple experts to reach the exact same conclusion. It took a 212 page report to say what I did in the paragraph above. I think the logic was, "We just wasted months and millions of dollars to prove what everybody already knew, we need to at least make the report thick to make it look like we did something."