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Having worked for a government contractor, it was my impression during my time there that they're so worried about oversight of the money and what miss-spending

Having worked for a government contractor, it was my impression during my time there that they're so worried about oversight of the money and what miss-spending and corruption looks like that they spend most of the money making sure it doesn't get miss-spent. Often the amount spent recovering miss-spent money far out-weighs the cost of what was miss-spent in the first place. One example my attention was drawn to is that a government employee overspent by $1.50 for a drink that was misassigned an expense code for the amount they spent. If they'd used the correct expense code or spent $1.50 less, no eyebrows would have been raised. Instead everything was processed and the person was pulled into a tribunal in front of other government employees who were being paid to oversee spending. Lord knows what those employees were paid to investigate this miss-spend. On top of the fact this employee was paid to attend the tribunal. This kind of behaviour is a gross waste of time and money... for $1.50 at a cost of many thousands of dollars to reclaim - or more likely re-assign to the correct expense code... and for what? If you want to see your tax dollars at work, it's right here, making sure none of your hard earned money gets miss-spent.

bobthepanda 8y ago
It's accountability in the age before we had AIs that could spot strange patterns of behavior across millions of government employees. Presumably now there might be more efficient ways to do this, but it's a combination of inertia and fear of what the consequences would be if such a program didn't work out. The upside of the current system is that it leaves huge paper trails and everything is auditable; the downside is that actually auditing all this stuff is so painful. It also doesn't really help that a majority of the politicians and a majority of voters foam at the mouth about government waste, no matter how minuscule and how much it would actually cost to eliminate. If we implemented more efficient algorithms and saved 90% of administration but some waste slipped through they'd say the government was getting sloppy. You see this a lot when people rail against, say, fare evasion on public transit; people would rather have 10x of a bunch of highly paid employees to manually check every ticket, instead of having proof-of-payment and random inspections with fines, because it feels like the right thing to do.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Here's the scale of problem the government deals with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkcrtvN60s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkcrtvN60s That's an experimental YF-22A crashing due to a software glitch. That's a $300-400M hand-crafted state-of-the-art-on-a-hundred-dimensions supersonic jet, almost killing the test pilot (an engineer who flies planes) 50 feet off the ground at 150 mph. Just the cost of training that pilot is easily in the millions of dollars. Everyone agrees the budget process is nuts, right up until something like that happens. And then everyone who ever signed any document related to that airplane is able to sleep at night. Except the software teams that wrote or approved the code. They're going to loose sleep, and they know why. Oh, and the DoD is a rounding error compared to CMS. They have routine fraud complaints that would sink a major defense contractor.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    I think fraud detection and holding people accountable for safety lapses are two completely different problems calling for different solutions. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything's a nail. If we didn't spend so much money on fraud detection via immense bureaucracy, that would increase the amount of money available to provision services.
GuinansEyebrows 8y ago
Serious investigations of seemingly-trivial events can produce some startling information. Look into the ongoing Kealoha scandal in Oahu. One broken mailbox is tearing down a massive criminal conspiracy.

bobthepanda 8y ago

It's accountability in the age before we had AIs that could spot strange patterns of behavior across millions of government employees. Presumably now there might be more efficient ways to do this, but it's a combination of inertia and fear of what the consequences would be if such a program didn't work out. The upside of the current system is that it leaves huge paper trails and everything is auditable; the downside is that actually auditing all this stuff is so painful. It also doesn't really help that a majority of the politicians and a majority of voters foam at the mouth about government waste, no matter how minuscule and how much it would actually cost to eliminate. If we implemented more efficient algorithms and saved 90% of administration but some waste slipped through they'd say the government was getting sloppy. You see this a lot when people rail against, say, fare evasion on public transit; people would rather have 10x of a bunch of highly paid employees to manually check every ticket, instead of having proof-of-payment and random inspections with fines, because it feels like the right thing to do.

killjoywashere 8y ago
Here's the scale of problem the government deals with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkcrtvN60s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JkcrtvN60s That's an experimental YF-22A crashing due to a software glitch. That's a $300-400M hand-crafted state-of-the-art-on-a-hundred-dimensions supersonic jet, almost killing the test pilot (an engineer who flies planes) 50 feet off the ground at 150 mph. Just the cost of training that pilot is easily in the millions of dollars. Everyone agrees the budget process is nuts, right up until something like that happens. And then everyone who ever signed any document related to that airplane is able to sleep at night. Except the software teams that wrote or approved the code. They're going to loose sleep, and they know why. Oh, and the DoD is a rounding error compared to CMS. They have routine fraud complaints that would sink a major defense contractor.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  I think fraud detection and holding people accountable for safety lapses are two completely different problems calling for different solutions. Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean everything's a nail. If we didn't spend so much money on fraud detection via immense bureaucracy, that would increase the amount of money available to provision services.

GuinansEyebrows 8y ago

Serious investigations of seemingly-trivial events can produce some startling information. Look into the ongoing Kealoha scandal in Oahu. One broken mailbox is tearing down a massive criminal conspiracy.