Right, but the system could convert the value to all caps after you enter it, no?

The contractors who designed this would need more time and money to add that feature. Probably 4 weeks, 100K.

I was about to say.

It could almost be a 2-liner Javascript (gasp!), 1 to import jQuery (more gasps!) and 1 to run all inputs through toUpperCase()...

The bill will be 95K, thanks!

To be fair, the 95K (imaginary, I know, but let's just roll with that) is not for paying you to write those four lines, but rather to pay you for your investment in knowing that you only have to write those four lines.

Same as the restaurant bill is not equal+margin to what they spend on food, it's also everything else like rent, salaries + margin.

Or rather, the 95K also includes the formal verification testing for the boatload of downstream systems that get the data.

That is usually what makes cost in government projects explode as they are an utterly wild mix-and-match of code and hardware that is from the earliest era of mainframes 60 years ago to stuff that has been made in the last half year. Alone testing for encoding issues can take weeks... because most testing has to be done and verified manually.

Yes, basic formatting and sanitisation... Web programming lvl.1 here.

You can build an index on LOWER or UPPER to make case insensitive searches.