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Maybe I've seen too many movies, but I'd be worried about retaliation if I were her. But then again maybe $300 million is chump change to Booz.
by stuff4ben 3y ago
Maybe I've seen too many movies, but I'd be worried about retaliation if I were her. But then again maybe $300 million is chump change to Booz.
- dylan604 3y agoFrom the TFA: "that holds annual contracts valued at $6.5 billion with nearly every U.S. government agency." 4.6%, maybe not a rounding error, but definitely cost of doing business area
- briffle 3y ago> Booz Allen last month admitted no wrongdoing while paying a $377 million settlement I wish I could get away with that, but i'm middle class.
- skyyler 3y agoI hear that term a lot, but what does "middle class" mean to you? When you say you are "middle" what do you mean?
- rescripting 3y agoIt means that paying a settlement of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to make legal troubles disappear is out of reach.
- skyyler 3y agoThat's true of whatever class is lesser than the middle class, as well. I was just curious what separates the "middle" from the "bottom".
- dylan604 3y agoyou gotta be in the upper middle at least to even come close to racking up $377 million of anything, right?
- skyyler 3y agoSure. But what separates the middle from the lower?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> what separates the middle from the lower Property. Historically, this meant land. Today, it means assets. Savings of any kind. The poor live pay check to pay check; the middle class could survive a bad harvest.
- skyyler 3y agoThank you for responding to my curiosity with discussion, not mockery. This makes sense to me. Owning things at all makes you middle class, and not destitute. Why is this distinction important?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Why is this distinction important? The safety buffer it provides lets you take more risk, personally, civically and societally. That lets you access rewards someone fighting for sustenance can’t countenance. Consider the years we, as a society, spend educating our youth when they could be working a field to produce food. It also means leverage. If a harvest failed, the poor in the army got fed. The others didn’t. The middle class, on the other hand, wasn’t forced into that choice simply to survive. (We use the term “survive” nowadays to mean maintain some arbitrary quality of life, but I’m speaking literally.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 3y ago
- briffle 3y agoHonestly, I make a low six figure income (starts with a 1), with a couple of kids, and a stay at home partner, and work from home in a moderate city for housing and costs on the west coast. We make ends meet, can afford the things we want to do, but never seem to actually build any savings. (grocery costs are eating us alive this past year or two)
- pc86 3y agoMedian household (not individual) income in the US is barely $70k, not sure I'd consider 50% above the median at the low end "middle." But most people here, myself included, probably make $150-200k/yr before any stock or RSUs so I'm looking forward to the mental gymnastics calling that middle class.
- mrguyorama 3y agoBasing class structure on difference from the societal median is a bad idea. It means making the entire country except a few poorer grows the "middle" class. There are three classes: Struggling, comfortable, and rich. If paying for necessities like transport, housing, and food requires significant efforts to manage cash flow or is even impossible, you are struggling. If you don't know when your employer pays you because you haven't had a cash flow problem in a decade, you are comfortable. If you don't have an employer because your wealth comes from things, you are rich.
- pc86 3y agoI mean you can simplify it even more into "haves" and "have nots" but there's a reason nobody serious does that anymore, because it doesn't give you any useful information, nor does those three categories. That doesn't change the fact that almost everybody wants to think of themselves as middle class, but especially here on HN most people are definitely not. If you make $200k cash plus RSUs on top of that you may not be rich but you're certainly on your way there and you're certainly not middle class in the way that carpenter making $75k with his stay at home wife in Houston is.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- praxulus 3y agoYou can, it's called an Alford plea. You maintain your innocence but accept the plea deal anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea
- burkaman 3y agoMaintaining your innocence is easy, anyone can do that, it's the avoiding any meaningful punishment that is difficult.
- aidenn0 3y agoYou too can probably get away with a $377 million settlement for most torts.
- whatshisface 3y agoI wouldn't get a $377 settlement for defrauding the government $500, but apparently you can obtain a $377M penalty for defrauding the government $500M. In fact, I would not be able to "settle" at all...
- dylan604 3y agoThere's a lot of times where deals are made because the government looks at how much it's going to cost to get the full value vs the settlement price. If the cost to gain the full value is larger than the settlement, then getting the full value is actually a loss compared to the settlement. Also, the government makes deals willing to take a haircut to get some vs none. A settlement is both parties giving something, not just the accused.
- sleepybrett 3y agoIn any smaller theft the thieves usually have to make >100% restitution (balance of stolen + fines). I wish I could get away with stealing and only having to pay back a small percentage of my takings. We need to stop passing out sweatheart deals to corporations it only leads to more theft.
- gabereiser 3y agoAgreed but then who would manage the state clerks IT department? Deloitte? It’s a case of “You’re in the wrong but we secretly need you because we are even more incompetent”
- sleepybrett 3y agoI mean BAH or whoever can continue doing that after they pay back the stolen funds if the state clerk will allow it. I'm just griping with, time after time, a company stealing 100m dollars or whatever and then reaching a settlement that lets them get off scott free after paying back 50m.
- gruez 3y agoThe 4.6% figure only makes sense if you think all their business involves wrongdoing and this is the only instance that got caught. If you take the penalty and divide by how much they allegedly made ($500M), you get a much worse figure of 75.4%.
- thfuran 3y agoBut if the penalty for malfeasance is 75% of the profits gained thereby, malfeasance is still profitable. Even if the fine were 100% of the profits, it'd still remain a profitable strategy unless the odds of being caught were 100%.
- gruez 3y agosee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37310663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37310663 In short, penalties aren't theoretically capped at 100%. That said, it's still theoretically possible to construct situations where the expected cost of lawsuits is less than what can be gained by the illegal act. However to make that claim you'd need to correctly calculate what the chances are of getting caught is, which is far more complex than pointing to a court case where someone settled.
- thfuran 3y ago>In short, penalties aren't theoretically capped at 100%. Yes, which makes it all the more galling that they seem to never even reach that much in such cases.
- datavirtue 3y agoNo amount is too much to shield the management class from their consequences. It didn't put one dent in the managers finances to pay that out. Plus they don't have to go to prison. It reads like your typical story where a Kennedy family member kills some girl and gets away with it (one of them went to prison once until the supreme court overturned the conviction).
- toyg 3y agoThe difference is that one (the post's) is systemic, "by design"; the other is episodic.
- vlovich123 3y agoHer share for blowing the whistle is $40M. I think she’s set for life unless your implying retaliation in the form of harassment.
- krisoft 3y ago> unless your implying retaliation in the form of harassment I think they implied retaliation in the form of assassination.
- johndhi 3y agolol... if they retaliate against her she gets to file another case and win even more money. I'm not sure what to make of the assassination intimation; I mean... so far as I know there's no history of corporate whistleblowers being killed or having their lives threatened physically. Government whistleblowers, of course, is a different story.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoThere is a long history of intimidating people who dare speak out against corporations. Maybe not overt threats, but hard to know what is real when you are in the hot seat. Are they just stalking you or are things going to get worse? If you are Jeffrey Wigand and some goons steal your computer, what do you do?
- johndhi 3y agoand for this reason, there are extremely harsh laws against whistleblower retaliation.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoI'm just trying to picture anyone at Booz Allen trying to get a hit squad together, lol. It'd be like a bunch of 20 year old kids out of a two-week American Ninja Warrior bootcamp.
- nova22033 3y agoMaybe I've seen too many movies, but I'd be worried about retaliation if I were her. She's worked at BAH. I'm sure she's not worried about them sending a hit squad to take her out....but only because she knows that if they did, the mission would turn into a 200 person engagement that would end up overbudget and overdue..and the end result would be one mean comment on her facebook page.
- oxfordmale 3y agoLesson learnt....bla bla...selected scape goats disciplined. We promise we won't get caught doing this again....