50 ms·

Dear Bureaucrat, my job wants me to lie

587 points by David_Reed 7y ago

maxxxxx 7y ago
Seems this is common with a lot of processes that require review by others. On the surface this sounds great and thorough but the reviewers actually need the qualifications and time to review things properly. I have done plenty of code and spec reviews where I really didn’t understand what’s going on and certainly didn’t have time to get up to speed. So you nitpick a few little things or just approve and move on with your real work.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Looks like every "four eye approval" process I know. In the end just everything is confirmed out of pressure to have a clean queue. And let's be honest, just by looking at individual requests a person can never have the necessary context. Needless to mention that four eye approval of that kind isn't even a legal requirement under SOX.
- closeparen 7y ago
  A “this is not categorically insane” stamp is still better than the absence of such a review. It doesn’t have to be “I stake my reputation on an ironclad guarantee that this will perform perfectly in all circumstances.”
deathanatos 7y ago
All. The. Time. Legal paperwork is "it's just standard required legal blahblahblah, just sign it" right up until there's a dispute, and then it might as well have been signed in blood. A job I worked at required that I acknowledge having received and read a pamphlet on sexual harassment in the workplace. My understanding is that it is a requirement of the state of CA that employers distribute such a pamphlet. The state even has a stock pamphlet that fulfills the requirement, though employers are free to substitute their own. My employer wanted me to acknowledge that I'd received the one via the HR website … except the link caused 500 Internal Server Errors. I reported this, and even noted that if the link just goes to the standard pamphlet [and I linked to that] that we could consider the defect in the website "cured" and I could sign and life could move on. That part of the message got ignored, of course; the people responsible for the HR site are like "well it works for us?", and of course there's still pressure to sign a statement that I've read this thing. All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)
- im3w1l 7y ago
  > All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.) I'd be interested in what would happen if you pushed hard on this point. Giving people surprise contracts after they have quit their previous job, moved their family and acquired a new house should not be acceptable.
  - behringer 7y ago
    Those people get the documents. I've never been in a job that required me to sign something that I couldn't see. When it doesn't work, you say no. People are too afraid to say no.
  - ptero 7y ago
    Unfortunately, pushing hard (as in, "I will not sign this since it was not given to me pre-employment") might actually get you booted. Companies routinely update policies and a refusal to comply with those, even created post-hiring, may be sufficient for termination. If what you mean is "this policy sounds reasonable, but I cannot sign anything sight unseen" any reasonable HR will just print (scan / email) you a copy of anything they want you to sign. My 2c.
    - fdjlasdfjl 7y ago
      Absolutely. HR is a risk management organization. They are not there to help your manager hire you. They do not care about you.
    - moftz 7y ago
      The first part is totally reasonable. If the company wants to change policies and you don't agree to those policies (and are in no way able to change them), why should they let you stay? Why should you let yourself stay? If a new policy is that egregious that you would rather possibly lose your job than sign in agreement, why would you even want to stay there? At that point, it's in everyone's best interests to part ways before it becomes a real issue. If the company actually cares about keeping you and they have any sort of leeway as to changing the policy, they will listen to why you can't agree to it.
inflatableDodo 7y ago
Terry Pratchett nailed the expectations of commerce pretty well. Lies are ingrained in our business dealings and openly enforced by management. >"Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel like the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer.’ They feel they are poking fun of the whole thing."
- adolph 7y ago
  From Pratchett’s novel Equal Rites https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Rites-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett/dp/0062225693 https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Rites-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett...
- onion2k 7y ago
  All the more amusing when you realise that Pratchett's job prior to becoming an author was as a public relations officer.
- hollander 7y ago
  In Star Trek you have the Ferengi, a species known for lying. I like them because you know what you can expect. Of course I've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say this... ;-)
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    >Of course I've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say this... ;-) You may be dealing with them more than you know. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang
komali2 7y ago
Last defcon someone did a really interesting presentation on how to investigate the government or government officials. Talked about how to get a FOIA request responded to, where to look for information. What really stuck with me though was a slide they offered towards the beginning. I don't have it memorized, but it was demonstrating a sort of "pyramid of public outrage" for certain actions. Sex with children was at the top as most likely to generate outrage, hypocrisy was at the bottom, and somewhere near the bottom was misappropriation of government funds.
- samfriedman 7y ago
  Do you know if this talk is on YouTube?
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    I found the talk: https://www.wallofsheep.com/blogs/news/list-of-packet-hacking-village-talks-at-def-con-26-finalized#ebrink https://www.wallofsheep.com/blogs/news/list-of-packet-hackin... https://twitter.com/ebrinkster/status/1028085975887429639 https://twitter.com/ebrinkster/status/1028085975887429639 It doesn't look like it's on YouTube unfortunately.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Ah, thank you! I had spent 15 minutes unsucessfully looking through the program for it. I can't find his slides on the media server: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20presentations/ https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20pre... Usually everything from defcon is present. Weird. Anyway, someone more motivated than me may be able to turn them up. Thank you for finding the speaker.
      - novok 7y ago
        Seeing the no camera symbol in the twitter picture, I think it not being on the internet was done on purpose.
- 7y ago
awakeasleep 7y ago
Breaucracy hacking. I guess I'm a subversive type, because my first instinct was to 'sign' the forms with the word 'unverifiable' in long hand
- ballenf 7y ago
  That would still likely count as your signature. Same reason an ‘X’ works.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    I don’t know about that. One requirement of a contract is a “meeting of the minds,” i.e. both sides are in agreement. An X indicates that, but “unverifiable” would seem not to.
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    My preference is to annotate exceptions to what I am signing in legible block print, and then initial and date at the end of each annotation. When I sign, I include my full name and the date in block print as well as "with exceptions." Bureaucrat/legal types usually understand that asking me to sign a fresh copy without those annotations is explicitly asking me to lie.
sbhn 7y ago
Liar and Lawyer, sound the pretty much the same to me.
avs733 7y ago
This type of thing goes beyond normalization of deviance to acculturation of deviance. This article, rightly, focuses on the direct impact of individual acts of false certification. But this type of normalizing and even requiring it likely has broader impacts in how employees enegage with information and communication around their job in ways that affect authenticity and intention in hard to observe ways. This is a scary thing to me...very scary.
tvanantwerp 7y ago
This Dear Bureaucrat letter seems interesting as well. In response to the query, "How do I deal with this inadequate computer system?", the response is to use Shadow IT. I have strong feelings against Shadow IT, but I have equally strong feelings about government IT systems being garbage. I'm torn. https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureaucrat-how-can-i-work-with-and-around-my-agencys-useless-computer-system/ https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureau...
- pfortuny 7y ago
  Goodness, that reply is awesome in the detail and savoir faire! Thanks for sharing.
  - empath75 7y ago
    It makes the mistake of assuming, as the letter writer does, that the purpose of the foia system is to reply to requests in an accurate and timely manner, rather than to bury them in red tape.
  - David_Reed 7y ago
    [Running sarcasm detector.] Thanks!
    - pfortuny 7y ago
      Honest, I’m impressed.
- David_Reed 7y ago
  Thanks. I'll post that column to Hacker News tomorrow.
  - stronglikedan 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure tvanantwerp just did. ;-)
derefr 7y ago
These things happen because the executives originally charged with implementation of some external compliance requirement know that they have the power to implement changes, but don’t have the ground-level information required to feed those changes. So these requirements get delegated down the org-chart, to people with ground-level information but without power; under the presumption that a response will flow back up the org-chart from said people, telling the higher-up what is needed-but-unavailable on the ground to actually implement the requirement. In other words, the higher-up is trying to receive an error condition by installing an exception handler in their part of the system, and then expecting the ground-level routine to realize there’s a problem and throw an exception, and for that exception to make its way back to them. But, unlike in software, where you usually feed everything as source through a single compiler at some point, and so you can force every component of the system to support exception-handling the same way; in organizational “systems”, the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with “exceptional” reports that cross their desks. They haven’t been informed that it’s part of their job to keep raising these reports up a level until someone sees them who can handle them. And because they haven’t been told that, they try to “handle” the exception themselves, in order to present a clean interface to their own boss—usually by just tossing the exception-report out, and chewing out their subordinate for giving it to them. If you’re a CEO, and you think you might ever need to use “exception handling” as a way to collect ground-level information, you’ve gotta ensure every layer of your management understands this in advance—understands that they won’t be blamed for a “fault” happening below them, and in fact that this fault was expected, even encouraged by people above them; and that those higher-ups need to know when ground-level faults happen. Sadly, even for organizations that that implement this policy perfectly... it only ends up “counting” for the types of exception-reports they were looking for at the time that they set up the policy. So, for example, retail companies know to reraise security reports; companies that employ tradespeople know to reraise health-and-safety reports; etc. But these same companies, when it comes to other types of exception-reports, are no better than anyone else. They learned a specific lesson, but not the general one.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  > the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with “exceptional” reports that cross their desks Or they explicitly don't want to report them because it makes it look like they don't know what they are doing, or they are afraid that it would create more work for them and they are already overworked.
im3w1l 7y ago
A friend had these problems frequently and said that if it was a legal/contractual requirement, he would adhere to it to the letter. But if it was some out-of-touch boss's boss's boss that made an unrealistic demand, his inclination was to go with "how it was done".
drdeadringer 7y ago
Reading the article and the comments prompted me to wonder what would happen if//when I say something to the order of "may I read it first?". As I age, I feel myself becoming more cautious than I was [perhaps as cautious as I should have been in the first place a la "everyone agrees to the EULA"].
gumby 7y ago
Interesting they say "suck it up, lie, or resist". The other way is to push the requirement further down: I don't understand this thing you're buying but you have represented to me that it is necessary. That's the actual responsible way to do it.
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  It doesn't look like a total fix in this case, since the questioner still has to certify that they've only approved essential things. The initial form is too badly botched for "I've verified that this was claimed as essential" to suffice. But in general, this is a good point. People are always going to have to accept decisions with incomplete information. The fix for that isn't owning outcomes they don't understand, it's clarifying what they're really doing; in this case, George isn't verifying the necessity but rather that experts have declared the thing necessary.
- cakeface 7y ago
  I like this thought. What would it take to certify the form? 10 hours a month? 20? Can you redirect other people on your team to work on this? When it is broken down to a cost (time) calculation then it might actually become reasonable to invest in a better system for accounting and analyzing expenditures.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    Today I expensed a $10 BNC connector. How long do you suppose it would take to confirm that it was a part we need, that we don't already have, and that I got a good price on it? And how many such claims do you think each person in the finance department sees each day?
    - gubbrora 7y ago
      You can deduce immediately that expensing is cheaper than the time it would take to investigate thoroughly
      - 7y ago
Bartweiss 7y ago
> they found commanders were required to certify their troops completed 297 days of mandatory training, when only 256 days were available for training. I think we often underestimate just how bad this sort of thing is. It's not just a question of personal integrity, or of whether the real value is a viable one. First, these practices create miscommunication. If some clever analyst realizes training can be done in 256 days rather than 297, they might write a report recommending 30 days be shaved off training time. And unless someone who knows about the discrepancy gets involved, it's possible that "cut 30 days" will get implemented formally against the lower real timeframe. (This sort of thing happens all the time with budgets, where extra money that's been informally redirected to a different expense is formally cut as bloat.) Second, they weaken the integrity of the system. No matter how upstanding the individuals, certifying nonsense disrupts a Schelling point of "printed and signed claims are accurate", and so it becomes harder to react to actual problems like the people cheating on nuclear missile readiness training. It's the print equivalent of unimportant elements in a safety routine; changing the routine is fine, but getting sloppy endangers the parts that do matter.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  Although in a very different context, the certification of nonsense is to a great extent what made the economy in the USSR a total mess. Lots of money is lost because of this.
- pjscott 7y ago
  Here's a podcast where one of the authors of that study goes into more detail, especially on your second point: http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-in-the-military/ http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-i...
  - papln 7y ago
    The OP links to Wong's paper, but the URL is bad: correct URL: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf bad URL in OP: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB12...
howard941 7y ago
It's frightening that this arises in the procurement context. I fear for the good USG people in these situations. The Boeing tanker fraud wasn't all that long ago, the folks fallen from the highest levels to federal prison. https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-go-away/ https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-go-...
emeraldd 7y ago
There is another alternative as well, require that anyone submitting a purchasing request sign a document with substantially similar if not identical wording and provide their case for why a purchase is needed. That way you build up your own paper trail if someone submitting requests is doing so nefariously.
thinkcontext 7y ago
The CYA thing to do here is to create a paper trail of you asking your boss and HR what procedure you need to follow to determine if something is essential. They likely won't respond at all or in writing, send a follow-up in writing noting their lack of response.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Do you really send two or more emails for every piece of red tape that you go through? The overhead here is ridiculous, all for CYA from lawsuits that won't affect 99% of workers.
  - thinkcontext 7y ago
    You only need to do this once. It establishes the procedure or lack thereof.
- parliament32 7y ago
  This is the true bureaucratic answer. Also insert a CYA about why you're signing the form now, so you can keep signing it after their non-response without exposing yourself to too much risk. Something like, "I've attempted to verify the list of items, and to my knowledge they appear essential, but can you clarify the procedure for determining whether an expenditure is essential or not?"
- novok 7y ago
  Do you save the emails so it doesn't get deleted by the 3 month retention policy later on?
brodouevencode 7y ago
These fall into the white lies bucket. Largely inconsequential, rarely checked on, and when things do go south deniable to a degree large enough for the person to not lose their job.
hurrdurr2 7y ago
I have to deal with OSHA and other local regulatory agencies on a regular basis. Having to deal with a bunch of unimaginative (or simply stupid) people who force you to conform to poorly written regulatory requirements is just soul sucking.
- jancsika 7y ago
  They should force you to conform to the requirements regardless of their opinion of how poorly or well the regulation is written. If those aren't two separate issues then the whole system breaks down.
xwdv 7y ago
Has anyone every decided to just get terminated as a result of not signing something? How does that go when applying for your next job and you say you were terminated because you refused to sign something that wasn't true or was not in your favor?
- codingdave 7y ago
  I only tried refusing to sign something once. Nobody ever called me on it. I got nastygrams via email. I ignored them. One day, they stopped coming. I cannot guarantee that will work in all situations, of course. You basically are calling their bluff, and it could backfire. But if they really are bluffing, all is well.
  - avs733 7y ago
    I think the problem here is that of 'who's bluff are you calling'. Usually the people bothering me about these types of things aren't the one's doing the bluffing about it...they are in their own loop of compliance and nastygrams. They are trained to be compliant and don't have a mental framing that this stuff could be a bluff. That makes me a lot less confident of how they will react or their willingness to be rational.
andrewla 7y ago
I was recently at a medical office (this is in the US), and they had replaced their system, so I had to re-sign the variety of forms that they make you sign, HIPAA disclosure, etc. They gave me an electronic signature pad and asked me to sign. I pointed out that I did not have a document in front of me, and they said that they would give me a copy of the signed form after I signed it. I once again attempted to point out that I was being asked to sign a form that I couldn't read, and they said, "oh, it's just a privacy disclosure". A superviser (who was overseeing the migration to the new system) came by and asked what the issue was, and I said I was being asked to sign a form without seeing what I was signing. They very patiently explained to me that it was a HIPAA disclosure, and I said that if I could sign their description, I would be happy to, but I'm not going to sign a more formal document having only been given a summary of it. They further explained that if I wanted, they could print out a copy of the form after I signed it for my records. Nobody at the office seemed to understand here what my objection was. I overheard other patients saying things like "I'm not signing something I haven't seen", so I know that I wasn't crazy. Eventually I convinced the person I was working with to turn their monitor around so that I could read the documents before signing them. The thing is that everyone knows that these forms are completely meaningless anyway. I probably would have been better off just signing the forms so that if they ever came up in a court case I could just honestly say that I had never seen the form before.
- 300bps 7y ago
  Nobody at the office seemed to understand here what my objection was. Of course not. Because the rest of us were writing, "HERP DERP" in the signature line and moving on with our lives.
  - why_only_15 7y ago
    The OP said > I overheard other patients saying things like "I'm not signing something I haven't seen" So it sounds like this was a common complaint
  - benburleson 7y ago
    Actually, that made me think of a good idea. If the provider employees aren't aware of what's actually happening in this situation or just don't care, just write, "I didn't read this form" on the signature line and hand it back. Have a good laugh when that document is presented to a judge.
retube 7y ago
oh dear lord does this ring true. Yours, someone that works in banking
sanderjd 7y ago
I got lots of dirty looks at my house closing when I re-read all the documents I was signing. I had read copies of them the night before, but I wanted to make sure they were the same.
- breischl 7y ago
  did that same thing once, and discovered that they had swapped the numbers for the interest rate and the term, so it was specified as a 4 year mortgage at 30% interest. Ouch! The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment later. Which I flatly refused to do - no f'ing way I'm signing on for $20k/month payments and hoping they fix it real soon now, especially when the fix is printing off one corrected page.
  - bachmeier 7y ago
    > The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment later. Given the ethics of the mortgage industry, this might not have even been a mistake. They're terrible and they'd have held you to it.
    - yellowstuff 7y ago
      Not a chance. No one would actually pay 30% interest instead of 4% for a house, and there's no way the contract would hold up in court.
      - BeetleB 7y ago
        >No one would actually pay 30% interest instead of 4% for a house, and there's no way the contract would hold up in court Who will reimburse me the legal fees? Lots and lots of people improperly lost their homes due to illegal robo-signing. They could have saved their houses if they had the resources to fight it in court.
      - bachmeier 7y ago
        Why wouldn't it hold up if you signed it? And after how many years of litigation? And you're going to let the house go into foreclosure?
jupp0r 7y ago
Shouldn't this be something that should be delegated down the hierarchy? Presumably - for each purchase - somebody knows whether the purchase is needed. If the person in question has insufficient information to make that decision, all he should do is check that people down the hierarchy made that decision and can be held accountable for it.
Scown 7y ago
Complying with payment card industry (PCI DSS) requirements is an absolutely insane process, even if you're vaguely technically literate. Obviously not saying payment processing isn't an incredibly important area to enforce good security practice. But it's a lonely place to be when you're attesting to hundreds of ridiculous requirements relating to your overpriced, off-the-shelf POS system and anything/anyone that touches it. "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely, yes." Cross fingers. Repeat annually.
- empath75 7y ago
  Also has lovely requirements like having antivirus installed on your Linux servers.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    Is that wrong? Malware does exist for Linux, and that way you can also detect malware designed for other systems if it ends up on the machine.
    - hyperpape 7y ago
      Antivirus software is not particularly effective, and also a significant attack vector. You can find several interesting stories just by searching antivirus on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=antivirus&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=antivirus&sort=byPopularity&pr....
    - kbenson 7y ago
      It depends on the AV. Either the AV ties into the kernel with a module, in which case it can also be an avenue for an increased permissions exploit, or it doesn't have any special kernel level capabilities, in which case it will never find rootkits that include kernel modules to hide themselves. Personally, I would be happy with an open source community based disk scanner looking for weirdly named files and folders (there are common variants used in hacks) and a locked down selinux config. Bonus points if you compile a kernel that doesn't allow modules (but IIRC that doesn't preclude kernel level shenanigans). Interestingly, it looks like since the PCI requirement for AV is for "all systems commonly affected by malicious software" they don't actually require it of all Linux systems in all cases.[1] 1: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-pass-pci-dss-2-0-anti-virus-requirement-5-1-on-linux https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-pa...
throw20102010 7y ago
There are two distinct types of lying mentioned in the article, and each should be handled differently: 1. The non-issue "lie" that was the subject of the original question. Sometimes I get a little annoyed at people that take a form completely literally and then raise a stink about it. Every form like this has an implied "to the best of my knowledge" inserted in it. You cannot know for 100% certainty that every purchase was completely necessary. Did every piece of paper that was printed from that ream you ordered get used in a necessary function, or did maybe one or two sheets get used for someone to print their baseball tickets out at the office? Could some of those papers have been stored digitally instead of printed? Of course that ream of paper wasn't used for 100% necessary business purposes. But by signing the form you are saying, "it doesn't look like there are any employees in my branch that are stealing tons of office supplies, and that our waste seems reasonable." What you are saying is that "I'm not personally aware of any fraud going on with the supply order, and I've done some due diligence to check." What you are NOT saying is "I personally tracked every piece of paper and staple in the office to make sure nobody was cheating." That is not the expectation with these certifications, and any federal employee fired for that level of expectation can go to arbitration and would certainly win. Luckily federal employees have probably the strongest employment protections of anybody in the USA. 2. The second type of lie, mentioned in the anecdote about the Army officers, is a problem but easily fixed in a way that you don't sacrifice your integrity. This is the case in which adding the implied "to the best of my knowledge" doesn't fix the issue. To fix this, you must line out the "297 days" portion and write in (a different colored ink) the correct number of days that you trained. Then you sign in ink, and return a scanned copy to wherever it needs to go. You probably cannot change the form in Adobe Reader because most government forms are protected against changes, so you must alter the form with pen. If the people that you returned the form to raise a stink (usually they want a digital signature), you simply explain that you cannot comply because to do so would be perjury. If they still won't accept your corrected version of the form you can stall, but let your boss/commander know that you cannot sign the form as-is because to do so would be a violation of federal law- and you can't be fired for not breaking the law. Most of the time, it falls out on your side. If not, you would have your defense counsel salivating to take this one past arbitration to make some real money. Pretty much every federal employee that cares about their integrity has already discovered the answers to these situations, and I suspect that this question is more of a straw man so that the author can talk about the pervasive culture of dishonesty that exists in the workplace. He's right in that a culture of dishonesty does exist, but he's missing the mark on where it's a problem. It's not in the resource management office that signs off on the paper/staples/toner orders or the Army officer that signs a training certification form that has the wrong number of days on it (as long as he feels his troops are mission ready). The culture of dishonesty is where a person awards a contract with a particular company so that they can get a cushy job in the private sector, or with people that accept a free trip to Disneyland to overlook an issue. Those are the dishonest incidents that matter, and they do not arise from some imagined "slippery slope" after certifying an office supply order.
naringas 7y ago
so this is why (sometimes) my hopes for the future depend on mediocrity and corruption, when the system is this stupid medocrity and corruption (which are terrible) can save the day! does this mean that the system is even worse? (the answer depends on how well "it has treated" you).
neilv 7y ago
This sounds somewhat familiar, though I approached what I saw a different way, with different outcome. I'm getting out of independent technical consulting (just as soon as I find the right dotcom/startup employer), because the various business burdens, separate from the actual technical expertise I provide, kept increasing, and I could no longer cost-justify the burdens. One kind of burden is regulatory compliances, and my favorite example is when a client needed me to be able to check a box in a compliance-tracking system Web form, attesting something like "I have an understanding of the FAR" document. I'm by-the-book about such things, so I put tech work on hold, dug in, and started reading. The FAR is actually not bad, pretty accessible, and I imagine a lot of serious straight-shooter accountant types put a lot of work into this, as part of making things run well, and I respect that immensely, and am glad they do that. But the current FAR PDF file is approx. 2,000 pages, and my expertise is in software. It took me a solid person-week to read through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours. (On some later burdens, I had learned from this, and talked with the clients. Some burdens the client could help with, and some not.) I agree with the need for such regulations and processes, but these and other burdens seemed to keep increasing, one of the architecture projects that would've made up for the overhead didn't seem to be coming through, and the burdens no longer made financial/personal sense for my particular one-person business. So, when a last straw burden was added (though reasonable, from a regulatory perspective), amidst some reorg on the parent contracts, I had to terminate a couple contracts for very positive projects that I'd been proud to be working on.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
  > It took me a solid person-week to read through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours. You should have billed! Then they would understand the burden regulations have on their business.
glitchc 7y ago
That’s okay. Bureaucrats are also forced to lie as part of their job. They pretend not to understand (it’s their job to pretend) but they really do.
yspeak 7y ago
This is called regulation.
yspeak 7y ago
Par for the course in the modern bureaucratic state and it's all good until there's a prosecutor who doesn't like you. I particularly admire those who sign government contracts incorporating half the CFR. What courage
dmd 7y ago
When I signed up for life insurance, I was required to sign a form asserting that I have not "ever been instructed by a doctor to stop taking any prescription or non-prescription medication". Uh, what? Apparently, what's meant is a doctor never told you to stop abuse of a drug. But that's not what it said, and I ended up having to go the 'subversive' route and submit the forms on paper, with this line crossed out, and an explanation attached.
WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
Regulatory burdens are some of the most frustrating challenges of running a small business. If you're a big business like Amazon or Northwestern Hospital, you can afford to hire entire teams of administrative staff to handle regulatory paperwork and procedure. 50% of the staff in most healthcare facilities are administrative staff, hired to deal handle the regulatory burden Obamacare placed on those facilities. Small businesses can't afford that, and it has crushed a few companies I've worked at already.
dkarl 7y ago
I've rarely encountered situations where a superior wouldn't tell me on the record exactly what level of diligence is necessary, and the few exceptions turned out to be extremely toxic situations. Which expenditures are "essential" can't always be objectively determined anyway. The purpose of the rule is not to ensure that inessential expenditures don't slip through the process but rather to ensure a chain of accountability that can be checked if some flagrant violation is discovered. In the letter-writer's position, it's probably only their job to be able to produce evidence of who assured them that an expenditure was essential, which means they need to put the right language on the form by which people request expenditures. As far as I understand it, procurement teams exist because a dedicated team of specialists can be more efficient and effective at procurement, not because spending decisions should be second-guessed by people who don't have the background to understand them.
supercanuck 7y ago
This isn’t limited to public service, the private sector is rife with this as well.
ataturk 7y ago
$3 Trillion spent in current fiscal year. $798 Billion deficit. But we're doing great, right?
sonnyblarney 7y ago
This is a good thing to talk about but let's not pretend that this is just a government thing.
- jasonhansel 7y ago
  It's probably even more common in the private sector (especially in relatively informal business arrangements where contracts consist of boilerplate).
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    It can only happen where there is real entrenched power and companies do not have to be competitive. Most 'private companies' are not at the scale where they have that. I would imagine that 'Healthcare' is rife with this kind of thing, they are cash flush, and the outcomes are intangible but existential (like defence). I can't imagine people playing solitaire at any kind of Health insurer etc. but I can certainly imagine them spending gazillions on boondoggles. I have a family member who does 'BD' for Health Care, I'm certain from years of chats with her that she does nothing. Meets, plans, talks about possible future plans with other corps, they never work out. Looks into 'strategic initiatives' that are secondary and irrelevant. She's paid handsomely. And she's pretty smart, great communicator, certainly not a 'solitaire player' ... but about as efficient. And FYI I'm aware of how even 'good' BD works, and that it's mostly 'misses'.
Waterluvian 7y ago
The advice to "cross out" the offending lines has been interesting to me as of late. I bought my first house recently and with that comes a thousand signatures for all kinds of things. I ran into a few interesting cases. 1. Nobody seems to notice or care. I did this to a bunch of minutiae, misspellings, wrong addresses, etc. They do make it into the scanned copy and as far as I'm concerned, the record. But nobody seems to notice or care that it got changed. 2. "Let's talk about it but I still want your business." I crossed out some things about data sharing that I disagreed with on some insurance forms. I got a call days later that someone noticed this. It sounded like they had a protocol for handling it. This felt like a, "there's an option to decline but we won't show it to you; you have to ask for it" kind of thing. 3. "You just ruined this 30 page document." Okay so she didn't say that, but she did have to make an effort not to sound irritated that I crossed out some stuff. The resolution was a polite, "this is non-negotiable by the lender. If you don't agree, then we won't be confirming the mortgage today and you won't be closing today, leading to an expensive breach in the contract with the home seller." She then re-printed the sheet I "ruined" and I initialed it.
- papln 7y ago
  > leading to an expensive breach in the contract with the home seller." Did you waive your financing contingency?
- bagacrap 7y ago
  I think in the case of most documents you sign when buying a home, a) you don't have a choice (except don't buy a home) b) there are way too many documents to read (are you seriously going to pay the notary to sit there for 6 hours?) and c) it's all highly regulated and formulaic. Have you ever heard an anecdote to the contrary, ie someone who was bitten by a hidden clause when buying a home?
  - sneak 7y ago
    I think this is only the case when getting a mortgage, which involves a regulated third party which is likely going to resell or insure the debt, involving fourth parties. If you just buy the house like you buy anything else, everything is negotiable.
cwkoss 7y ago
The author is not nearly subversive enough. The really subversive action is to start a paper trail reporting every instance of your co-workers falsly certifying in cases where they had insufficient knowledge.
macspoofing 7y ago
There has to be a process around defining what 'essential obligations and expenditures' means for the purposes of signing off on procurement - even if it the definition is 'because my boss says so'. If not, this is the typical disconnect between defining processes (and laws and regulations and heck, even software requirements) and the practical aspects of actually implementing it. I'm sure it sounded good to whoever put this process together that only 'essential obligations' are procured because defining processes is easy and fun! Abiding by them is hard work.
KorematsuFred 7y ago
One of the best examples of this is US Student Visa system. US Consulates in India hold hundreds of events each year to entice Indian students to USA. They also actively tell students about their wonderful OPT and CPT programs and how they can convert to H1B later. When an Indian student appears before the consulate officer the student must convince the officer that he/she will promptly return back to India after studies are completed. Even though it is perfectly legal to get a student visa, then work on OPT and get your H1B through lottery it is not something you can admit to the visa officer.
qqbXsiVvwgc75SB 7y ago
This normalization of deviance can burn you for playing along. In a previous job at an F100 company we routinely used contractors for a lot of day to day work. Every other week we had to sign a statement certifying the number of hours worked. This was fine for the first couple of years when we only had about a dozen contractors split across two managers. As our organization grew, so did the number of contractors, mostly under a third manager at a different site. Due to peculiarities about how this large, blue logoed F100 company dealt with purchasing and contractors, I and a peer still had to sign the certifications instead of the third manager. We both protested (verbally, which was a mistake in hindsight) but were told "just go ahead it's how we do things." Funny thing. That third manager, working out of our sight with their army of contractors at another site? Yeah. They were colluding with the contracting agency to overbill the company. My peer left for unrelated reasons. The colluding manager left for another company as the scheme was coming to light. I spent a week being grilled by the company's purchasing team and eventually company lawyers about my "participation" in the scheme. Because, of course, I had signed all of these timesheets certifying that the hours worked were true. In the end as far as I can tell the only penalty was for the contracting agency to be barred from working with the company again (they closed, formed a new LLC, and started right up again within a year). I got dinged professionally as the only manager left holding the bag so to speak. So, if you find yourself in that sort of situation where you're being pressured to accommodate the process because that's how we've always done it, get it in writing absolving you of any responsibility for signing off.
- ptmcc 7y ago
  I used to work for a consulting/contracting company, with 6-10 reports at any given time. I was responsible for reviewing and approving their time sheets. Except that, due to the nature of the business, I didn't see or even communicate with most of my reports on a daily or even weekly basis. They were working on different projects under different contracts for different customers in different locations. My manager responsibilities were an add-on to my own near-full-time billable work. I raised my personal concerns to my own manager(s) that I did not feel that I could confidently and truthfully review and approve my reports' timesheets. Their response was effectively "just go with it, it's the way it works". Basically I was told to rubber stamp them with my name as the approver. I don't necessarily believe that anyone was maliciously abusing the system, but I definitely believe that casual and hard-to-prove overbilling was a regular occurrence. I don't work there anymore.
TallGuyShort 7y ago
This bothers me as well. I've seen an employment contract that stated any hand-written addenda were invalid, so the idea of crossing out a clause or correcting it is at least partially defeated. Some other things I've tried: - Instead of signing, I write (quickly, to appear like I'm signing, but legibly enough that no one can later claim I wrote anything else) "unable to comply", "documentation not received", or something like that. I haven't tried this in situations where I knew someone would check, but when I have tried it no one has noticed. If they ever attempt to use it against me I imagine it won't get very far. As a side-note, I also write "Fake Name" when asked to sign credit card receipts and in 13+ years not one person ever noticed, which is how I know that it's useless for fraud prevention. - If I am asked to sign a very large complicated form, especially when it's something that should have been sent to me in advance (which I usually request), I will stand there and read it, making notes as I go through to help myself understand it. When they rush me, I then give them the lecture about how it either doesn't matter and I shouldn't have to sign it to proceed, or it does matter and they shouldn't ask me to sign it without reading it. They are welcome to get my money at a later date, or wait for me to read it. On one occasion I had to sign a massive agreement to buy a TV. I stood there reading it until a manager came over and, wanting to make the sale and let his rep get back to work, signed a copy of the agreement stating that the store would honor the warranty even though I hadn't signed.
- lotophage 7y ago
  > I've seen an employment contract that stated any hand-written addenda were invalid, so the idea of crossing out a clause or correcting it is at least partially defeated Couldn't you just cross out that line?
- joncrane 7y ago
  The signature is used for follow up when a transaction is reported as fraudulent. It's never checked proactively.
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    What incentive do people have to sign their name correctly on legitimate transactions then? If I plan on reporting a transaction is fraudulent, I just sign my name weird and make sure they don't have cameras? I don't understand how this helps. What I thought was supposed to happen is you're supposed to have signed your name on the back of the card and they check that your receipt matches the card, and it's a weak form of 2FA.
SimonPStevens 7y ago
All the stories in this thread about people having to sign stuff without reading it. I guess this just makes them all unenforceable in reality if anyone actually challenged them. Perhaps this is why anything actually serious I've ever signed requires witnesses.
deckar01 7y ago
> I can’t know whether each item we purchase is essential. Many of them are highly technical. > The subversive way is to circumvent the requirement to lie. Can you cross out the offending sentence on the form each month before you sign it? ... I have used this method. This seems like terrible advice. It pretty much guarantees that no one is accountable and the problem will only get worse. Don't sign anything until the necessary evidence is provided and be prepared to reject purchases that lack justification. Inaction and delegation are powerful tools in the hands of a bureaucrat, use them.
awinter-py 7y ago
diane vaughan talks about this stuff in the challenger book -- she found claims of fact by SMEs that were vetoed by nasa managers, and thinks that this is one mechanism for groups to leak risk.
DoctorOetker 7y ago
Would it be possible to require similar signed forms from those below you, until the bottom? If an unwarranted expense was made, the whole chain will be responsible, and the discussion can then finally focus on how to actually specify sane rules and requirements (i.e. normal volumes of low expenses get ignored, larger expenses need to be vetted by multiple people on the same level etc...)
harrisonjackson 7y ago
My first salaried job had an employment agreement that said I would pay the company to work there instead of getting paid. I had it fixed before signing, but I was employee #5.......
tabtab 7y ago
If you are between a rock and a hard place like in the article, it's best to keep a copy of the email where you object to the language, and store a copy at home. It shows you made a reasonable attempt to remedy the problem if it ever turns into a big case against you.
danbmil99 7y ago
I once bought a house. It was advertised as sitting on "an acre plus". When we started doing the paperwork we noticed it was written as .85 acres. But the tax map was broken up into two parcels, one of which was clearly about 1/4 as large as the other. They were both marked as about 40% of an acre. Everyone involved in the deal, including my spouse at the time, was upset when I said that we had to go walk the property and figure this out. Apparently nobody gave a crap about half an acre here or there, even though this represented about half of the property under discussion. I finally got my way. The real estate broker took one of those DaVinci wheels and, in his fancy loafers, in the pouring rain, walked the wheel through tick infested woods until he had surveyed the entire property. It was .51 acres
- fred_is_fred 7y ago
  For the commission the guy got for doing the relative;ly simple job of selling a house it was frankly the least he could do.
  - danbmil99 7y ago
    Having been through the hell of buying property twice in my life, I say take the real estate brokers out before you even get to the lawyers and accountants. There's no rational way to account for them taking 5% or more off every transaction, especially with the price inflation of the last few years.
chisleu 7y ago
They call it "shadow IT" but I like to call it "the cuff system". Putting a fun antiquated name on things like designing one off, and potentially dangerous IT infrastructure because you can't get anyone to fix what is wrong is itself wrong. It's part of the problem. It's a growing cause of personal information leaks and people shouldn't celebrate encouraging it.
hollander 7y ago
How about signing under protest? So you sign, but at the same time you signal that you're not OK with the situation. In the Netherlands this is often used if you don't agree with the amount you have to pay for something. When you sign under protest, you admit that you got the products or service you requested, but you are not satisfied with the quality or the price.
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587 points by David_Reed 7y ago

Seems this is common with a lot of processes that require review by others. On the surface this sounds great and thorough but the reviewers actually need the qualifications and time to review things properly. I have done plenty of code and spec reviews where I really didn’t understand what’s going on and certainly didn’t have time to get up to speed. So you nitpick a few little things or just approve and move on with your real work.

hef19898 7y ago
Looks like every "four eye approval" process I know. In the end just everything is confirmed out of pressure to have a clean queue. And let's be honest, just by looking at individual requests a person can never have the necessary context. Needless to mention that four eye approval of that kind isn't even a legal requirement under SOX.
closeparen 7y ago
A “this is not categorically insane” stamp is still better than the absence of such a review. It doesn’t have to be “I stake my reputation on an ironclad guarantee that this will perform perfectly in all circumstances.”

deathanatos 7y ago

All. The. Time. Legal paperwork is "it's just standard required legal blahblahblah, just sign it" right up until there's a dispute, and then it might as well have been signed in blood. A job I worked at required that I acknowledge having received and read a pamphlet on sexual harassment in the workplace. My understanding is that it is a requirement of the state of CA that employers distribute such a pamphlet. The state even has a stock pamphlet that fulfills the requirement, though employers are free to substitute their own. My employer wanted me to acknowledge that I'd received the one via the HR website … except the link caused 500 Internal Server Errors. I reported this, and even noted that if the link just goes to the standard pamphlet [and I linked to that] that we could consider the defect in the website "cured" and I could sign and life could move on. That part of the message got ignored, of course; the people responsible for the HR site are like "well it works for us?", and of course there's still pressure to sign a statement that I've read this thing. All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)

im3w1l 7y ago
> All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.) I'd be interested in what would happen if you pushed hard on this point. Giving people surprise contracts after they have quit their previous job, moved their family and acquired a new house should not be acceptable.
- behringer 7y ago
  Those people get the documents. I've never been in a job that required me to sign something that I couldn't see. When it doesn't work, you say no. People are too afraid to say no.
- ptero 7y ago
  Unfortunately, pushing hard (as in, "I will not sign this since it was not given to me pre-employment") might actually get you booted. Companies routinely update policies and a refusal to comply with those, even created post-hiring, may be sufficient for termination. If what you mean is "this policy sounds reasonable, but I cannot sign anything sight unseen" any reasonable HR will just print (scan / email) you a copy of anything they want you to sign. My 2c.
  - fdjlasdfjl 7y ago
    Absolutely. HR is a risk management organization. They are not there to help your manager hire you. They do not care about you.
  - moftz 7y ago
    The first part is totally reasonable. If the company wants to change policies and you don't agree to those policies (and are in no way able to change them), why should they let you stay? Why should you let yourself stay? If a new policy is that egregious that you would rather possibly lose your job than sign in agreement, why would you even want to stay there? At that point, it's in everyone's best interests to part ways before it becomes a real issue. If the company actually cares about keeping you and they have any sort of leeway as to changing the policy, they will listen to why you can't agree to it.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

Terry Pratchett nailed the expectations of commerce pretty well. Lies are ingrained in our business dealings and openly enforced by management. >"Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel like the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer.’ They feel they are poking fun of the whole thing."

adolph 7y ago
From Pratchett’s novel Equal Rites https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Rites-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett/dp/0062225693 https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Rites-Discworld-Terry-Pratchett...
onion2k 7y ago
All the more amusing when you realise that Pratchett's job prior to becoming an author was as a public relations officer.
hollander 7y ago
In Star Trek you have the Ferengi, a species known for lying. I like them because you know what you can expect. Of course I've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say this... ;-)
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  >Of course I've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say this... ;-) You may be dealing with them more than you know. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang

komali2 7y ago

Last defcon someone did a really interesting presentation on how to investigate the government or government officials. Talked about how to get a FOIA request responded to, where to look for information. What really stuck with me though was a slide they offered towards the beginning. I don't have it memorized, but it was demonstrating a sort of "pyramid of public outrage" for certain actions. Sex with children was at the top as most likely to generate outrage, hypocrisy was at the bottom, and somewhere near the bottom was misappropriation of government funds.

samfriedman 7y ago
Do you know if this talk is on YouTube?
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  I found the talk: https://www.wallofsheep.com/blogs/news/list-of-packet-hacking-village-talks-at-def-con-26-finalized#ebrink https://www.wallofsheep.com/blogs/news/list-of-packet-hackin... https://twitter.com/ebrinkster/status/1028085975887429639 https://twitter.com/ebrinkster/status/1028085975887429639 It doesn't look like it's on YouTube unfortunately.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Ah, thank you! I had spent 15 minutes unsucessfully looking through the program for it. I can't find his slides on the media server: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20presentations/ https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2026/DEF%20CON%2026%20pre... Usually everything from defcon is present. Weird. Anyway, someone more motivated than me may be able to turn them up. Thank you for finding the speaker.
    - novok 7y ago
      Seeing the no camera symbol in the twitter picture, I think it not being on the internet was done on purpose.
7y ago

awakeasleep 7y ago

Breaucracy hacking. I guess I'm a subversive type, because my first instinct was to 'sign' the forms with the word 'unverifiable' in long hand

ballenf 7y ago
That would still likely count as your signature. Same reason an ‘X’ works.
- mikeash 7y ago
  I don’t know about that. One requirement of a contract is a “meeting of the minds,” i.e. both sides are in agreement. An X indicates that, but “unverifiable” would seem not to.
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  My preference is to annotate exceptions to what I am signing in legible block print, and then initial and date at the end of each annotation. When I sign, I include my full name and the date in block print as well as "with exceptions." Bureaucrat/legal types usually understand that asking me to sign a fresh copy without those annotations is explicitly asking me to lie.

sbhn 7y ago

Liar and Lawyer, sound the pretty much the same to me.

avs733 7y ago

This type of thing goes beyond normalization of deviance to acculturation of deviance. This article, rightly, focuses on the direct impact of individual acts of false certification. But this type of normalizing and even requiring it likely has broader impacts in how employees enegage with information and communication around their job in ways that affect authenticity and intention in hard to observe ways. This is a scary thing to me...very scary.

tvanantwerp 7y ago

This Dear Bureaucrat letter seems interesting as well. In response to the query, "How do I deal with this inadequate computer system?", the response is to use Shadow IT. I have strong feelings against Shadow IT, but I have equally strong feelings about government IT systems being garbage. I'm torn. https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureaucrat-how-can-i-work-with-and-around-my-agencys-useless-computer-system/ https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureau...

pfortuny 7y ago
Goodness, that reply is awesome in the detail and savoir faire! Thanks for sharing.
- empath75 7y ago
  It makes the mistake of assuming, as the letter writer does, that the purpose of the foia system is to reply to requests in an accurate and timely manner, rather than to bury them in red tape.
- David_Reed 7y ago
  [Running sarcasm detector.] Thanks!
  - pfortuny 7y ago
    Honest, I’m impressed.
David_Reed 7y ago
Thanks. I'll post that column to Hacker News tomorrow.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure tvanantwerp just did. ;-)

derefr 7y ago

These things happen because the executives originally charged with implementation of some external compliance requirement know that they have the power to implement changes, but don’t have the ground-level information required to feed those changes. So these requirements get delegated down the org-chart, to people with ground-level information but without power; under the presumption that a response will flow back up the org-chart from said people, telling the higher-up what is needed-but-unavailable on the ground to actually implement the requirement. In other words, the higher-up is trying to receive an error condition by installing an exception handler in their part of the system, and then expecting the ground-level routine to realize there’s a problem and throw an exception, and for that exception to make its way back to them. But, unlike in software, where you usually feed everything as source through a single compiler at some point, and so you can force every component of the system to support exception-handling the same way; in organizational “systems”, the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with “exceptional” reports that cross their desks. They haven’t been informed that it’s part of their job to keep raising these reports up a level until someone sees them who can handle them. And because they haven’t been told that, they try to “handle” the exception themselves, in order to present a clean interface to their own boss—usually by just tossing the exception-report out, and chewing out their subordinate for giving it to them. If you’re a CEO, and you think you might ever need to use “exception handling” as a way to collect ground-level information, you’ve gotta ensure every layer of your management understands this in advance—understands that they won’t be blamed for a “fault” happening below them, and in fact that this fault was expected, even encouraged by people above them; and that those higher-ups need to know when ground-level faults happen. Sadly, even for organizations that that implement this policy perfectly... it only ends up “counting” for the types of exception-reports they were looking for at the time that they set up the policy. So, for example, retail companies know to reraise security reports; companies that employ tradespeople know to reraise health-and-safety reports; etc. But these same companies, when it comes to other types of exception-reports, are no better than anyone else. They learned a specific lesson, but not the general one.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
> the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with “exceptional” reports that cross their desks Or they explicitly don't want to report them because it makes it look like they don't know what they are doing, or they are afraid that it would create more work for them and they are already overworked.

im3w1l 7y ago

A friend had these problems frequently and said that if it was a legal/contractual requirement, he would adhere to it to the letter. But if it was some out-of-touch boss's boss's boss that made an unrealistic demand, his inclination was to go with "how it was done".

drdeadringer 7y ago

Reading the article and the comments prompted me to wonder what would happen if//when I say something to the order of "may I read it first?". As I age, I feel myself becoming more cautious than I was [perhaps as cautious as I should have been in the first place a la "everyone agrees to the EULA"].

gumby 7y ago

Interesting they say "suck it up, lie, or resist". The other way is to push the requirement further down: I don't understand this thing you're buying but you have represented to me that it is necessary. That's the actual responsible way to do it.

Bartweiss 7y ago
It doesn't look like a total fix in this case, since the questioner still has to certify that they've only approved essential things. The initial form is too badly botched for "I've verified that this was claimed as essential" to suffice. But in general, this is a good point. People are always going to have to accept decisions with incomplete information. The fix for that isn't owning outcomes they don't understand, it's clarifying what they're really doing; in this case, George isn't verifying the necessity but rather that experts have declared the thing necessary.
cakeface 7y ago
I like this thought. What would it take to certify the form? 10 hours a month? 20? Can you redirect other people on your team to work on this? When it is broken down to a cost (time) calculation then it might actually become reasonable to invest in a better system for accounting and analyzing expenditures.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Today I expensed a $10 BNC connector. How long do you suppose it would take to confirm that it was a part we need, that we don't already have, and that I got a good price on it? And how many such claims do you think each person in the finance department sees each day?
  - gubbrora 7y ago
    You can deduce immediately that expensing is cheaper than the time it would take to investigate thoroughly
    - 7y ago

Bartweiss 7y ago

> they found commanders were required to certify their troops completed 297 days of mandatory training, when only 256 days were available for training. I think we often underestimate just how bad this sort of thing is. It's not just a question of personal integrity, or of whether the real value is a viable one. First, these practices create miscommunication. If some clever analyst realizes training can be done in 256 days rather than 297, they might write a report recommending 30 days be shaved off training time. And unless someone who knows about the discrepancy gets involved, it's possible that "cut 30 days" will get implemented formally against the lower real timeframe. (This sort of thing happens all the time with budgets, where extra money that's been informally redirected to a different expense is formally cut as bloat.) Second, they weaken the integrity of the system. No matter how upstanding the individuals, certifying nonsense disrupts a Schelling point of "printed and signed claims are accurate", and so it becomes harder to react to actual problems like the people cheating on nuclear missile readiness training. It's the print equivalent of unimportant elements in a safety routine; changing the routine is fine, but getting sloppy endangers the parts that do matter.

pfortuny 7y ago
Although in a very different context, the certification of nonsense is to a great extent what made the economy in the USSR a total mess. Lots of money is lost because of this.
pjscott 7y ago
Here's a podcast where one of the authors of that study goes into more detail, especially on your second point: http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-in-the-military/ http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-i...
- papln 7y ago
  The OP links to Wong's paper, but the URL is bad: correct URL: https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf bad URL in OP: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB12...

howard941 7y ago

It's frightening that this arises in the procurement context. I fear for the good USG people in these situations. The Boeing tanker fraud wasn't all that long ago, the folks fallen from the highest levels to federal prison. https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-go-away/ https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-go-...

emeraldd 7y ago

There is another alternative as well, require that anyone submitting a purchasing request sign a document with substantially similar if not identical wording and provide their case for why a purchase is needed. That way you build up your own paper trail if someone submitting requests is doing so nefariously.

thinkcontext 7y ago

The CYA thing to do here is to create a paper trail of you asking your boss and HR what procedure you need to follow to determine if something is essential. They likely won't respond at all or in writing, send a follow-up in writing noting their lack of response.

WhompingWindows 7y ago
Do you really send two or more emails for every piece of red tape that you go through? The overhead here is ridiculous, all for CYA from lawsuits that won't affect 99% of workers.
- thinkcontext 7y ago
  You only need to do this once. It establishes the procedure or lack thereof.
parliament32 7y ago
This is the true bureaucratic answer. Also insert a CYA about why you're signing the form now, so you can keep signing it after their non-response without exposing yourself to too much risk. Something like, "I've attempted to verify the list of items, and to my knowledge they appear essential, but can you clarify the procedure for determining whether an expenditure is essential or not?"
novok 7y ago
Do you save the emails so it doesn't get deleted by the 3 month retention policy later on?

brodouevencode 7y ago

These fall into the white lies bucket. Largely inconsequential, rarely checked on, and when things do go south deniable to a degree large enough for the person to not lose their job.

hurrdurr2 7y ago

I have to deal with OSHA and other local regulatory agencies on a regular basis. Having to deal with a bunch of unimaginative (or simply stupid) people who force you to conform to poorly written regulatory requirements is just soul sucking.

jancsika 7y ago
They should force you to conform to the requirements regardless of their opinion of how poorly or well the regulation is written. If those aren't two separate issues then the whole system breaks down.

xwdv 7y ago

Has anyone every decided to just get terminated as a result of not signing something? How does that go when applying for your next job and you say you were terminated because you refused to sign something that wasn't true or was not in your favor?

codingdave 7y ago
I only tried refusing to sign something once. Nobody ever called me on it. I got nastygrams via email. I ignored them. One day, they stopped coming. I cannot guarantee that will work in all situations, of course. You basically are calling their bluff, and it could backfire. But if they really are bluffing, all is well.
- avs733 7y ago
  I think the problem here is that of 'who's bluff are you calling'. Usually the people bothering me about these types of things aren't the one's doing the bluffing about it...they are in their own loop of compliance and nastygrams. They are trained to be compliant and don't have a mental framing that this stuff could be a bluff. That makes me a lot less confident of how they will react or their willingness to be rational.

andrewla 7y ago

I was recently at a medical office (this is in the US), and they had replaced their system, so I had to re-sign the variety of forms that they make you sign, HIPAA disclosure, etc. They gave me an electronic signature pad and asked me to sign. I pointed out that I did not have a document in front of me, and they said that they would give me a copy of the signed form after I signed it. I once again attempted to point out that I was being asked to sign a form that I couldn't read, and they said, "oh, it's just a privacy disclosure". A superviser (who was overseeing the migration to the new system) came by and asked what the issue was, and I said I was being asked to sign a form without seeing what I was signing. They very patiently explained to me that it was a HIPAA disclosure, and I said that if I could sign their description, I would be happy to, but I'm not going to sign a more formal document having only been given a summary of it. They further explained that if I wanted, they could print out a copy of the form after I signed it for my records. Nobody at the office seemed to understand here what my objection was. I overheard other patients saying things like "I'm not signing something I haven't seen", so I know that I wasn't crazy. Eventually I convinced the person I was working with to turn their monitor around so that I could read the documents before signing them. The thing is that everyone knows that these forms are completely meaningless anyway. I probably would have been better off just signing the forms so that if they ever came up in a court case I could just honestly say that I had never seen the form before.

300bps 7y ago
Nobody at the office seemed to understand here what my objection was. Of course not. Because the rest of us were writing, "HERP DERP" in the signature line and moving on with our lives.
- why_only_15 7y ago
  The OP said > I overheard other patients saying things like "I'm not signing something I haven't seen" So it sounds like this was a common complaint
- benburleson 7y ago
  Actually, that made me think of a good idea. If the provider employees aren't aware of what's actually happening in this situation or just don't care, just write, "I didn't read this form" on the signature line and hand it back. Have a good laugh when that document is presented to a judge.

retube 7y ago

oh dear lord does this ring true. Yours, someone that works in banking

sanderjd 7y ago

I got lots of dirty looks at my house closing when I re-read all the documents I was signing. I had read copies of them the night before, but I wanted to make sure they were the same.

breischl 7y ago
did that same thing once, and discovered that they had swapped the numbers for the interest rate and the term, so it was specified as a 4 year mortgage at 30% interest. Ouch! The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment later. Which I flatly refused to do - no f'ing way I'm signing on for $20k/month payments and hoping they fix it real soon now, especially when the fix is printing off one corrected page.
- bachmeier 7y ago
  > The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment later. Given the ethics of the mortgage industry, this might not have even been a mistake. They're terrible and they'd have held you to it.
  - yellowstuff 7y ago
    Not a chance. No one would actually pay 30% interest instead of 4% for a house, and there's no way the contract would hold up in court.
    - BeetleB 7y ago
      >No one would actually pay 30% interest instead of 4% for a house, and there's no way the contract would hold up in court Who will reimburse me the legal fees? Lots and lots of people improperly lost their homes due to illegal robo-signing. They could have saved their houses if they had the resources to fight it in court.
    - bachmeier 7y ago
      Why wouldn't it hold up if you signed it? And after how many years of litigation? And you're going to let the house go into foreclosure?

jupp0r 7y ago

Shouldn't this be something that should be delegated down the hierarchy? Presumably - for each purchase - somebody knows whether the purchase is needed. If the person in question has insufficient information to make that decision, all he should do is check that people down the hierarchy made that decision and can be held accountable for it.

Scown 7y ago

Complying with payment card industry (PCI DSS) requirements is an absolutely insane process, even if you're vaguely technically literate. Obviously not saying payment processing isn't an incredibly important area to enforce good security practice. But it's a lonely place to be when you're attesting to hundreds of ridiculous requirements relating to your overpriced, off-the-shelf POS system and anything/anyone that touches it. "Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely, yes." Cross fingers. Repeat annually.

empath75 7y ago
Also has lovely requirements like having antivirus installed on your Linux servers.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
  Is that wrong? Malware does exist for Linux, and that way you can also detect malware designed for other systems if it ends up on the machine.
  - hyperpape 7y ago
    Antivirus software is not particularly effective, and also a significant attack vector. You can find several interesting stories just by searching antivirus on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=antivirus&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=antivirus&sort=byPopularity&pr....
  - kbenson 7y ago
    It depends on the AV. Either the AV ties into the kernel with a module, in which case it can also be an avenue for an increased permissions exploit, or it doesn't have any special kernel level capabilities, in which case it will never find rootkits that include kernel modules to hide themselves. Personally, I would be happy with an open source community based disk scanner looking for weirdly named files and folders (there are common variants used in hacks) and a locked down selinux config. Bonus points if you compile a kernel that doesn't allow modules (but IIRC that doesn't preclude kernel level shenanigans). Interestingly, it looks like since the PCI requirement for AV is for "all systems commonly affected by malicious software" they don't actually require it of all Linux systems in all cases.[1] 1: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-pass-pci-dss-2-0-anti-virus-requirement-5-1-on-linux https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-pa...

throw20102010 7y ago

There are two distinct types of lying mentioned in the article, and each should be handled differently: 1. The non-issue "lie" that was the subject of the original question. Sometimes I get a little annoyed at people that take a form completely literally and then raise a stink about it. Every form like this has an implied "to the best of my knowledge" inserted in it. You cannot know for 100% certainty that every purchase was completely necessary. Did every piece of paper that was printed from that ream you ordered get used in a necessary function, or did maybe one or two sheets get used for someone to print their baseball tickets out at the office? Could some of those papers have been stored digitally instead of printed? Of course that ream of paper wasn't used for 100% necessary business purposes. But by signing the form you are saying, "it doesn't look like there are any employees in my branch that are stealing tons of office supplies, and that our waste seems reasonable." What you are saying is that "I'm not personally aware of any fraud going on with the supply order, and I've done some due diligence to check." What you are NOT saying is "I personally tracked every piece of paper and staple in the office to make sure nobody was cheating." That is not the expectation with these certifications, and any federal employee fired for that level of expectation can go to arbitration and would certainly win. Luckily federal employees have probably the strongest employment protections of anybody in the USA. 2. The second type of lie, mentioned in the anecdote about the Army officers, is a problem but easily fixed in a way that you don't sacrifice your integrity. This is the case in which adding the implied "to the best of my knowledge" doesn't fix the issue. To fix this, you must line out the "297 days" portion and write in (a different colored ink) the correct number of days that you trained. Then you sign in ink, and return a scanned copy to wherever it needs to go. You probably cannot change the form in Adobe Reader because most government forms are protected against changes, so you must alter the form with pen. If the people that you returned the form to raise a stink (usually they want a digital signature), you simply explain that you cannot comply because to do so would be perjury. If they still won't accept your corrected version of the form you can stall, but let your boss/commander know that you cannot sign the form as-is because to do so would be a violation of federal law- and you can't be fired for not breaking the law. Most of the time, it falls out on your side. If not, you would have your defense counsel salivating to take this one past arbitration to make some real money. Pretty much every federal employee that cares about their integrity has already discovered the answers to these situations, and I suspect that this question is more of a straw man so that the author can talk about the pervasive culture of dishonesty that exists in the workplace. He's right in that a culture of dishonesty does exist, but he's missing the mark on where it's a problem. It's not in the resource management office that signs off on the paper/staples/toner orders or the Army officer that signs a training certification form that has the wrong number of days on it (as long as he feels his troops are mission ready). The culture of dishonesty is where a person awards a contract with a particular company so that they can get a cushy job in the private sector, or with people that accept a free trip to Disneyland to overlook an issue. Those are the dishonest incidents that matter, and they do not arise from some imagined "slippery slope" after certifying an office supply order.

naringas 7y ago

so this is why (sometimes) my hopes for the future depend on mediocrity and corruption, when the system is this stupid medocrity and corruption (which are terrible) can save the day! does this mean that the system is even worse? (the answer depends on how well "it has treated" you).

neilv 7y ago

This sounds somewhat familiar, though I approached what I saw a different way, with different outcome. I'm getting out of independent technical consulting (just as soon as I find the right dotcom/startup employer), because the various business burdens, separate from the actual technical expertise I provide, kept increasing, and I could no longer cost-justify the burdens. One kind of burden is regulatory compliances, and my favorite example is when a client needed me to be able to check a box in a compliance-tracking system Web form, attesting something like "I have an understanding of the FAR" document. I'm by-the-book about such things, so I put tech work on hold, dug in, and started reading. The FAR is actually not bad, pretty accessible, and I imagine a lot of serious straight-shooter accountant types put a lot of work into this, as part of making things run well, and I respect that immensely, and am glad they do that. But the current FAR PDF file is approx. 2,000 pages, and my expertise is in software. It took me a solid person-week to read through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours. (On some later burdens, I had learned from this, and talked with the clients. Some burdens the client could help with, and some not.) I agree with the need for such regulations and processes, but these and other burdens seemed to keep increasing, one of the architecture projects that would've made up for the overhead didn't seem to be coming through, and the burdens no longer made financial/personal sense for my particular one-person business. So, when a last straw burden was added (though reasonable, from a regulatory perspective), amidst some reorg on the parent contracts, I had to terminate a couple contracts for very positive projects that I'd been proud to be working on.

WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
> It took me a solid person-week to read through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours. You should have billed! Then they would understand the burden regulations have on their business.

glitchc 7y ago

That’s okay. Bureaucrats are also forced to lie as part of their job. They pretend not to understand (it’s their job to pretend) but they really do.

yspeak 7y ago

This is called regulation.

yspeak 7y ago

Par for the course in the modern bureaucratic state and it's all good until there's a prosecutor who doesn't like you. I particularly admire those who sign government contracts incorporating half the CFR. What courage

dmd 7y ago

When I signed up for life insurance, I was required to sign a form asserting that I have not "ever been instructed by a doctor to stop taking any prescription or non-prescription medication". Uh, what? Apparently, what's meant is a doctor never told you to stop abuse of a drug. But that's not what it said, and I ended up having to go the 'subversive' route and submit the forms on paper, with this line crossed out, and an explanation attached.

WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago

Regulatory burdens are some of the most frustrating challenges of running a small business. If you're a big business like Amazon or Northwestern Hospital, you can afford to hire entire teams of administrative staff to handle regulatory paperwork and procedure. 50% of the staff in most healthcare facilities are administrative staff, hired to deal handle the regulatory burden Obamacare placed on those facilities. Small businesses can't afford that, and it has crushed a few companies I've worked at already.

dkarl 7y ago

I've rarely encountered situations where a superior wouldn't tell me on the record exactly what level of diligence is necessary, and the few exceptions turned out to be extremely toxic situations. Which expenditures are "essential" can't always be objectively determined anyway. The purpose of the rule is not to ensure that inessential expenditures don't slip through the process but rather to ensure a chain of accountability that can be checked if some flagrant violation is discovered. In the letter-writer's position, it's probably only their job to be able to produce evidence of who assured them that an expenditure was essential, which means they need to put the right language on the form by which people request expenditures. As far as I understand it, procurement teams exist because a dedicated team of specialists can be more efficient and effective at procurement, not because spending decisions should be second-guessed by people who don't have the background to understand them.

supercanuck 7y ago

This isn’t limited to public service, the private sector is rife with this as well.

ataturk 7y ago

$3 Trillion spent in current fiscal year. $798 Billion deficit. But we're doing great, right?

sonnyblarney 7y ago

This is a good thing to talk about but let's not pretend that this is just a government thing.

jasonhansel 7y ago
It's probably even more common in the private sector (especially in relatively informal business arrangements where contracts consist of boilerplate).
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  It can only happen where there is real entrenched power and companies do not have to be competitive. Most 'private companies' are not at the scale where they have that. I would imagine that 'Healthcare' is rife with this kind of thing, they are cash flush, and the outcomes are intangible but existential (like defence). I can't imagine people playing solitaire at any kind of Health insurer etc. but I can certainly imagine them spending gazillions on boondoggles. I have a family member who does 'BD' for Health Care, I'm certain from years of chats with her that she does nothing. Meets, plans, talks about possible future plans with other corps, they never work out. Looks into 'strategic initiatives' that are secondary and irrelevant. She's paid handsomely. And she's pretty smart, great communicator, certainly not a 'solitaire player' ... but about as efficient. And FYI I'm aware of how even 'good' BD works, and that it's mostly 'misses'.

Waterluvian 7y ago

The advice to "cross out" the offending lines has been interesting to me as of late. I bought my first house recently and with that comes a thousand signatures for all kinds of things. I ran into a few interesting cases. 1. Nobody seems to notice or care. I did this to a bunch of minutiae, misspellings, wrong addresses, etc. They do make it into the scanned copy and as far as I'm concerned, the record. But nobody seems to notice or care that it got changed. 2. "Let's talk about it but I still want your business." I crossed out some things about data sharing that I disagreed with on some insurance forms. I got a call days later that someone noticed this. It sounded like they had a protocol for handling it. This felt like a, "there's an option to decline but we won't show it to you; you have to ask for it" kind of thing. 3. "You just ruined this 30 page document." Okay so she didn't say that, but she did have to make an effort not to sound irritated that I crossed out some stuff. The resolution was a polite, "this is non-negotiable by the lender. If you don't agree, then we won't be confirming the mortgage today and you won't be closing today, leading to an expensive breach in the contract with the home seller." She then re-printed the sheet I "ruined" and I initialed it.

papln 7y ago
> leading to an expensive breach in the contract with the home seller." Did you waive your financing contingency?
bagacrap 7y ago
I think in the case of most documents you sign when buying a home, a) you don't have a choice (except don't buy a home) b) there are way too many documents to read (are you seriously going to pay the notary to sit there for 6 hours?) and c) it's all highly regulated and formulaic. Have you ever heard an anecdote to the contrary, ie someone who was bitten by a hidden clause when buying a home?
- sneak 7y ago
  I think this is only the case when getting a mortgage, which involves a regulated third party which is likely going to resell or insure the debt, involving fourth parties. If you just buy the house like you buy anything else, everything is negotiable.

cwkoss 7y ago

The author is not nearly subversive enough. The really subversive action is to start a paper trail reporting every instance of your co-workers falsly certifying in cases where they had insufficient knowledge.

macspoofing 7y ago

There has to be a process around defining what 'essential obligations and expenditures' means for the purposes of signing off on procurement - even if it the definition is 'because my boss says so'. If not, this is the typical disconnect between defining processes (and laws and regulations and heck, even software requirements) and the practical aspects of actually implementing it. I'm sure it sounded good to whoever put this process together that only 'essential obligations' are procured because defining processes is easy and fun! Abiding by them is hard work.

KorematsuFred 7y ago

One of the best examples of this is US Student Visa system. US Consulates in India hold hundreds of events each year to entice Indian students to USA. They also actively tell students about their wonderful OPT and CPT programs and how they can convert to H1B later. When an Indian student appears before the consulate officer the student must convince the officer that he/she will promptly return back to India after studies are completed. Even though it is perfectly legal to get a student visa, then work on OPT and get your H1B through lottery it is not something you can admit to the visa officer.

qqbXsiVvwgc75SB 7y ago

This normalization of deviance can burn you for playing along. In a previous job at an F100 company we routinely used contractors for a lot of day to day work. Every other week we had to sign a statement certifying the number of hours worked. This was fine for the first couple of years when we only had about a dozen contractors split across two managers. As our organization grew, so did the number of contractors, mostly under a third manager at a different site. Due to peculiarities about how this large, blue logoed F100 company dealt with purchasing and contractors, I and a peer still had to sign the certifications instead of the third manager. We both protested (verbally, which was a mistake in hindsight) but were told "just go ahead it's how we do things." Funny thing. That third manager, working out of our sight with their army of contractors at another site? Yeah. They were colluding with the contracting agency to overbill the company. My peer left for unrelated reasons. The colluding manager left for another company as the scheme was coming to light. I spent a week being grilled by the company's purchasing team and eventually company lawyers about my "participation" in the scheme. Because, of course, I had signed all of these timesheets certifying that the hours worked were true. In the end as far as I can tell the only penalty was for the contracting agency to be barred from working with the company again (they closed, formed a new LLC, and started right up again within a year). I got dinged professionally as the only manager left holding the bag so to speak. So, if you find yourself in that sort of situation where you're being pressured to accommodate the process because that's how we've always done it, get it in writing absolving you of any responsibility for signing off.

ptmcc 7y ago
I used to work for a consulting/contracting company, with 6-10 reports at any given time. I was responsible for reviewing and approving their time sheets. Except that, due to the nature of the business, I didn't see or even communicate with most of my reports on a daily or even weekly basis. They were working on different projects under different contracts for different customers in different locations. My manager responsibilities were an add-on to my own near-full-time billable work. I raised my personal concerns to my own manager(s) that I did not feel that I could confidently and truthfully review and approve my reports' timesheets. Their response was effectively "just go with it, it's the way it works". Basically I was told to rubber stamp them with my name as the approver. I don't necessarily believe that anyone was maliciously abusing the system, but I definitely believe that casual and hard-to-prove overbilling was a regular occurrence. I don't work there anymore.

TallGuyShort 7y ago

This bothers me as well. I've seen an employment contract that stated any hand-written addenda were invalid, so the idea of crossing out a clause or correcting it is at least partially defeated. Some other things I've tried: - Instead of signing, I write (quickly, to appear like I'm signing, but legibly enough that no one can later claim I wrote anything else) "unable to comply", "documentation not received", or something like that. I haven't tried this in situations where I knew someone would check, but when I have tried it no one has noticed. If they ever attempt to use it against me I imagine it won't get very far. As a side-note, I also write "Fake Name" when asked to sign credit card receipts and in 13+ years not one person ever noticed, which is how I know that it's useless for fraud prevention. - If I am asked to sign a very large complicated form, especially when it's something that should have been sent to me in advance (which I usually request), I will stand there and read it, making notes as I go through to help myself understand it. When they rush me, I then give them the lecture about how it either doesn't matter and I shouldn't have to sign it to proceed, or it does matter and they shouldn't ask me to sign it without reading it. They are welcome to get my money at a later date, or wait for me to read it. On one occasion I had to sign a massive agreement to buy a TV. I stood there reading it until a manager came over and, wanting to make the sale and let his rep get back to work, signed a copy of the agreement stating that the store would honor the warranty even though I hadn't signed.

lotophage 7y ago
> I've seen an employment contract that stated any hand-written addenda were invalid, so the idea of crossing out a clause or correcting it is at least partially defeated Couldn't you just cross out that line?
joncrane 7y ago
The signature is used for follow up when a transaction is reported as fraudulent. It's never checked proactively.
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  What incentive do people have to sign their name correctly on legitimate transactions then? If I plan on reporting a transaction is fraudulent, I just sign my name weird and make sure they don't have cameras? I don't understand how this helps. What I thought was supposed to happen is you're supposed to have signed your name on the back of the card and they check that your receipt matches the card, and it's a weak form of 2FA.

SimonPStevens 7y ago

All the stories in this thread about people having to sign stuff without reading it. I guess this just makes them all unenforceable in reality if anyone actually challenged them. Perhaps this is why anything actually serious I've ever signed requires witnesses.

deckar01 7y ago

> I can’t know whether each item we purchase is essential. Many of them are highly technical. > The subversive way is to circumvent the requirement to lie. Can you cross out the offending sentence on the form each month before you sign it? ... I have used this method. This seems like terrible advice. It pretty much guarantees that no one is accountable and the problem will only get worse. Don't sign anything until the necessary evidence is provided and be prepared to reject purchases that lack justification. Inaction and delegation are powerful tools in the hands of a bureaucrat, use them.

awinter-py 7y ago

diane vaughan talks about this stuff in the challenger book -- she found claims of fact by SMEs that were vetoed by nasa managers, and thinks that this is one mechanism for groups to leak risk.

DoctorOetker 7y ago

Would it be possible to require similar signed forms from those below you, until the bottom? If an unwarranted expense was made, the whole chain will be responsible, and the discussion can then finally focus on how to actually specify sane rules and requirements (i.e. normal volumes of low expenses get ignored, larger expenses need to be vetted by multiple people on the same level etc...)

harrisonjackson 7y ago

My first salaried job had an employment agreement that said I would pay the company to work there instead of getting paid. I had it fixed before signing, but I was employee #5.......

tabtab 7y ago

If you are between a rock and a hard place like in the article, it's best to keep a copy of the email where you object to the language, and store a copy at home. It shows you made a reasonable attempt to remedy the problem if it ever turns into a big case against you.

danbmil99 7y ago

I once bought a house. It was advertised as sitting on "an acre plus". When we started doing the paperwork we noticed it was written as .85 acres. But the tax map was broken up into two parcels, one of which was clearly about 1/4 as large as the other. They were both marked as about 40% of an acre. Everyone involved in the deal, including my spouse at the time, was upset when I said that we had to go walk the property and figure this out. Apparently nobody gave a crap about half an acre here or there, even though this represented about half of the property under discussion. I finally got my way. The real estate broker took one of those DaVinci wheels and, in his fancy loafers, in the pouring rain, walked the wheel through tick infested woods until he had surveyed the entire property. It was .51 acres

fred_is_fred 7y ago
For the commission the guy got for doing the relative;ly simple job of selling a house it was frankly the least he could do.
- danbmil99 7y ago
  Having been through the hell of buying property twice in my life, I say take the real estate brokers out before you even get to the lawyers and accountants. There's no rational way to account for them taking 5% or more off every transaction, especially with the price inflation of the last few years.

chisleu 7y ago

They call it "shadow IT" but I like to call it "the cuff system". Putting a fun antiquated name on things like designing one off, and potentially dangerous IT infrastructure because you can't get anyone to fix what is wrong is itself wrong. It's part of the problem. It's a growing cause of personal information leaks and people shouldn't celebrate encouraging it.

hollander 7y ago

How about signing under protest? So you sign, but at the same time you signal that you're not OK with the situation. In the Netherlands this is often used if you don't agree with the amount you have to pay for something. When you sign under protest, you admit that you got the products or service you requested, but you are not satisfied with the quality or the price.

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