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The perfect example for how bloated, inefficient, and wasteful the bureaucracies of higher education can become. How did $40m of fraudulent spending go uncheck
by fiberoptick 5y ago
The perfect example for how bloated, inefficient, and wasteful the bureaucracies of higher education can become.
How did $40m of fraudulent spending go unchecked for literally years? It seems to be that even at the largest private sector organizations this kind of malfeasance would have been caught much sooner.
- voakbasda 5y agoBeyond a certain limit (~50 employees), the left hand loses track of the right hand. This is and will be the status quo, unless we legislate limits on corporations from growing too big. In other words, this is unlikely to change, because such limits should also be applied to government.
- hatchnyc 5y agoYeah, no. Companies that care about costs absolutely track what they’re spending and where. I’ve seen plenty of merely questionable expenses a fraction of this caught and called out at very large companies.
- gaze 5y agoBoth can be true. Companies will question every little nickel and dime certain employees spend and then have big stupid horrible blind spots in other places. Happens all the time. I was a PhD student at Yale and they were extremely touchy about certain kinds of spending, and then would also do stupid stuff like this.
- FrenchAmerican 5y agoIndeed, but that's also true for any large organization, whatever their status: public, private, nonprofit. I witnessed large sums being spent for very dubious reasons in private firms, mainly in order to meet ridiculous demands by executives. Show-off features despite no interest from customers, "visionary product" e.g. implementing a blockchain or "artificial intelligence" that classic algorithms could do as well for much cheaper. The idea that private entities pay more attention to money than public entities is a prejudice. At least in modern developed democracies. Financial scandals in private firms tend to be muted in order to preserve the external reputation: hence the impression that public entities are less careful. It's all the same everywhere, no general rule in that matter.
- 0xy 5y agoGoogle and Facebook's accounting departments fell for forged invoices worth over $100m. [1] Yale is far from an outlier. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/business/facebook-google-wire-fraud.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/business/facebook-google-...
- tssva 5y agoYale is a private sector organization.
- linksnapzz 5y agoYale, like much of US higher ed, is even more dependent on Federal spending and government tax breaks than ostensibly private firms like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, who make products that only the government can buy. It's not like it's Choate or Groton or St. George's highschool, where tuition and gifts need to cover expenses (and are still tax-free).
- tssva 5y agoRaytheon, Lockheed Martin and Yale are all private sector organizations. Being largely dependent on government spending and tax breaks does not make you a public sector organization.
- linksnapzz 5y agoBeing largely dependent on government spending and tax breaks does not make you a public sector organization. True in only the most reductive and naive sense; but this is the sort of mistake that ostensibly private orgs like the ones above count on, in order to avoid the kind of scrutiny & accountability that an explicitly public agency must endure.
- tssva 5y agoIf by reductive and naive sense you mean by the actual definition of private vs public sector.
- linksnapzz 5y agoIf it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck....