I totally believe you. I had a similar experience a few years ago when straightening out some property taxes with the California Franchise Tax Board. I needed to prove that a certain set of taxes on a rental property were adequately paid by my ex-wife on her tax return a couple years prior.

Mind-boggling things:

- They could not (would not?) look up her California tax return (the thing which contained the proof) in their own files, even though both she and I would have been perfectly happy to let them look at it.

- They could not accept just the portion of the tax return containing the proof. They required a copy of her whole tax return. Which was many pages because it contained details for several rental properties. It was something between 20-50 pages if I recall correctly.

- They could not accept an email of a PDF of the tax return (which we both already had and could have emailed them in an instant).

- They required that I fax them the entire return, to one specific fax machine in one specific department.

- That fax machine was constantly receiving similar faxes from other people in similar predicaments, so it was constantly a busy signal.

- When I finally got through and started sending, the machine on their end ran out of paper and hung up on me.

- I had tried some online fax services but they couldn't handle the issue with the redials and partial retries and none of them would properly complete the transaction. It's possible that I might have asked the BBS about fax services at that time, but basically none of them were useful for this because of the issues.

- So I had to use my work's physical fax machine after hours. I had to try many times, and carefully babysit the process when it finally got through,

- I could potentially have mailed the thing to them physically via snail mail instead, but they had drained my bank accounts and needed proof before I was allowed to have my money back. So the fax option was the fastest one.

So I understand how some bureaucratic organizations could possibly be strangely tied to fax systems.