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Embezzle (verb) - steal or misappropriate. You do not need to steal money from your employer and deposit it into your savings account to embezzle. Anything th

Embezzle (verb) - steal or misappropriate. You do not need to steal money from your employer and deposit it into your savings account to embezzle. Anything that is a misuse of company money is technically embezzlement. If you use company money meant to upgrade your computer to build a fancy aquarium on your desk instead, that's technically embezzlement. So would using company money to build a kitchen in your office - even if that's technically improving the company's property.

skissane 3y ago
> Anything that is a misuse of company money is technically embezzlement. > If you use company money meant to upgrade your computer to build a fancy aquarium on your desk instead, that's technically embezzlement. I knew this (now retired) public agency executive who couldn’t get enough money in her budget to keep the lights on, but the board was much more willing to fund new projects. Her solution? She’d get funding for all these new projects, use that to hire all these contractors, and quietly direct them to spend 50%+ of their time on “keeping the lights on” but bill 100% to the project. For example, funds appropriated for an identity management project paid for a network engineer who was supposed to configure the firewalls and load balancers for that project, but the project also paid for the weeks he spent upgrading outdated network switches in office buildings even though that had no logical connection with identity management. To my knowledge she never got in any trouble; on the contrary, I’m led to believe that “budget hacks” like hers are common in the public sector, and a lot of public agencies would just utterly collapse without them. Whereas, one of her underlings ended up in prison, because (apparently unbeknownst to her) he was awarding sham contracts to a company controlled by his friend. I think a big difference is the enterprise actually benefited from her redirection of funds, whereas it got absolutely zero out of his. I think these employees do have a problem in they appropriated company property such that the direct immediate benefit was solely to themselves. If they’d appropriated it in a way which benefited other employees as opposed to just themselves personally, I think that would have made it much harder to prosecute. The same public agency, there was an internal dispute over whether it was appropriate to use public funds to pay for expensive (>$1000) coffee machines for staff break rooms - other divisions were doing it, she insisted hers couldn’t because it would be a misuse of those funds. But as far as I know the divisions which did do that never got in any legal or other trouble. The managers who requisitioned these expensive coffee machines shared the benefit of them with their teams. I think she was more afraid of the press and politicians than the law but the press and politicians never found out (or else maybe they did but just decided they had bigger fish to fry than coffee machines)
- psunavy03 3y ago
  Speaking with Federal government experience, I'm 99 percent certain that what you describe is go-to-jail illegal to do with Federal funds absent explicit authorization. There is some ability to move funds around to do different things, but generally only related things and only with a paper trail of sign-offs from the proper authorities. Congress programs a budget, and that budget is expected to be spent as designed in Federal land. If there's X dollars allocated for, say, sending reservists on travel for training, you can move that money around to send a different group of people to a different base, but you can't use it to renovate the office.
  - skissane 3y ago
    It was state not federal, plus it wasn’t in the US. Maybe it is different in the US, but my experience is legislators generally don’t want to micromanage agency budgets - they’ll give the agency a bucket of money to spend but will leave it up to senior management to decide exactly how to spend it. Whether the agency spends $1 million on new LDAP servers or $1 million on new network switches is not the level of detail they want to drill down to, to them it is just “$10 million for X agency IT”. But for her, although she was responsible for proposing and delivering those projects, it was the level above her which had to approve carving them out of the overall budget, and that level was much more enthusiastic about paying for sexy stuff like identity management than boring stuff like replacing ancient network switches, even if the enterprise actually had a much more urgent need for the latter. So she just quietly redirected some of the sexy budget to help pay for those boring necessities
    - Royce-CMR 3y ago
      Former contract worker, US State Government - 100% similar stuff happens. But it can be a much finer line. Example: Approved effort for call center expansion to meet the growing demand of the public. Includes improvements to the backend business software to improve cycle time for the call center to meet goal of addressing public demand. Those backend software improvements - which were real, and did help the call center cycle time - just happened to be the same improvements requested by mobile field workers for 5+ years, which were never approved. Did a leader see the opportunity to make the 5+ year requests happen and pull it into the budget ask? Absolutely. Were the changes necessary to accomplish the call center project with the resource / staffing levels in the budget proposal? Yep. I view the prior example as the same. Sexy projects don't work unless the foundation is operational; allocating funds under Sexy project to shore up foundations is surprisingly common. The real learning for me is the vicious circle. New upstairs leader sees everyone say don't need to spend on sustain, so doesn't spend on sustain, but nods to higher-than-actual costs for New Cool Thing, and the layers below upstairs work the game to get key sustain tied into New Cool Thing projects... which then supports upstairs view that don't need higher sustain costs. Tough to break this.

skissane 3y ago

> Anything that is a misuse of company money is technically embezzlement. > If you use company money meant to upgrade your computer to build a fancy aquarium on your desk instead, that's technically embezzlement. I knew this (now retired) public agency executive who couldn’t get enough money in her budget to keep the lights on, but the board was much more willing to fund new projects. Her solution? She’d get funding for all these new projects, use that to hire all these contractors, and quietly direct them to spend 50%+ of their time on “keeping the lights on” but bill 100% to the project. For example, funds appropriated for an identity management project paid for a network engineer who was supposed to configure the firewalls and load balancers for that project, but the project also paid for the weeks he spent upgrading outdated network switches in office buildings even though that had no logical connection with identity management. To my knowledge she never got in any trouble; on the contrary, I’m led to believe that “budget hacks” like hers are common in the public sector, and a lot of public agencies would just utterly collapse without them. Whereas, one of her underlings ended up in prison, because (apparently unbeknownst to her) he was awarding sham contracts to a company controlled by his friend. I think a big difference is the enterprise actually benefited from her redirection of funds, whereas it got absolutely zero out of his. I think these employees do have a problem in they appropriated company property such that the direct immediate benefit was solely to themselves. If they’d appropriated it in a way which benefited other employees as opposed to just themselves personally, I think that would have made it much harder to prosecute. The same public agency, there was an internal dispute over whether it was appropriate to use public funds to pay for expensive (>$1000) coffee machines for staff break rooms - other divisions were doing it, she insisted hers couldn’t because it would be a misuse of those funds. But as far as I know the divisions which did do that never got in any legal or other trouble. The managers who requisitioned these expensive coffee machines shared the benefit of them with their teams. I think she was more afraid of the press and politicians than the law but the press and politicians never found out (or else maybe they did but just decided they had bigger fish to fry than coffee machines)

psunavy03 3y ago
Speaking with Federal government experience, I'm 99 percent certain that what you describe is go-to-jail illegal to do with Federal funds absent explicit authorization. There is some ability to move funds around to do different things, but generally only related things and only with a paper trail of sign-offs from the proper authorities. Congress programs a budget, and that budget is expected to be spent as designed in Federal land. If there's X dollars allocated for, say, sending reservists on travel for training, you can move that money around to send a different group of people to a different base, but you can't use it to renovate the office.
- skissane 3y ago
  It was state not federal, plus it wasn’t in the US. Maybe it is different in the US, but my experience is legislators generally don’t want to micromanage agency budgets - they’ll give the agency a bucket of money to spend but will leave it up to senior management to decide exactly how to spend it. Whether the agency spends $1 million on new LDAP servers or $1 million on new network switches is not the level of detail they want to drill down to, to them it is just “$10 million for X agency IT”. But for her, although she was responsible for proposing and delivering those projects, it was the level above her which had to approve carving them out of the overall budget, and that level was much more enthusiastic about paying for sexy stuff like identity management than boring stuff like replacing ancient network switches, even if the enterprise actually had a much more urgent need for the latter. So she just quietly redirected some of the sexy budget to help pay for those boring necessities
  - Royce-CMR 3y ago
    Former contract worker, US State Government - 100% similar stuff happens. But it can be a much finer line. Example: Approved effort for call center expansion to meet the growing demand of the public. Includes improvements to the backend business software to improve cycle time for the call center to meet goal of addressing public demand. Those backend software improvements - which were real, and did help the call center cycle time - just happened to be the same improvements requested by mobile field workers for 5+ years, which were never approved. Did a leader see the opportunity to make the 5+ year requests happen and pull it into the budget ask? Absolutely. Were the changes necessary to accomplish the call center project with the resource / staffing levels in the budget proposal? Yep. I view the prior example as the same. Sexy projects don't work unless the foundation is operational; allocating funds under Sexy project to shore up foundations is surprisingly common. The real learning for me is the vicious circle. New upstairs leader sees everyone say don't need to spend on sustain, so doesn't spend on sustain, but nods to higher-than-actual costs for New Cool Thing, and the layers below upstairs work the game to get key sustain tied into New Cool Thing projects... which then supports upstairs view that don't need higher sustain costs. Tough to break this.