Why not have users jump around in a form?

Starting to collect documents to do my tax return this year I came across a terrible user experience.

When you live in the US, but have assets (such as a bank account) in another country you need to fill in a form to declare how much money you have there. It used to be a paper form but now there is an online form to fill in.

This form has a great "feature"... When you fill in the form from top to bottom and you want to enter the state for your address, the drop down is empty... But there is a helpful comment letting you know that you first need to skip down two fields and select the country. Once the country is selected you can select the state. Note that the US of A that is selected for line/field 13 is there because I selected it before taking the screenshot. Initially no country is selected and hence no state can be selected...

I'm pretty sure the ordering is just whatever order the paper form (that is still available as a PDF version) have the fields in this order. And for some reason the electronic form was not changed to be logical but to mimic the paper form. A great example of how UI should not be a reflection of the implementation behind the scenes.