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This isn't a payments crisis; this is an auditing crisis. There's no way to ensure proper accounting procedures are being followed. At this point, Congress' con
by taylodl 2y ago
This isn't a payments crisis; this is an auditing crisis. There's no way to ensure proper accounting procedures are being followed. At this point, Congress' continued inaction is bordering on criminal.
- toomuchtodo 2y agohttps://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277055/gov.uscourts.dcd.277055.1.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.277...
- weard_beard 2y agoAt this point the US government would not pass a SOX audit.
- liontwist 2y agoSOX is for public corporations.
- hyperbrainer 2y agoYes, but that standard should probably be met and exceeded by the government of the largest economy in the world, don't you think?
- liontwist 2y agoIt sounds like you think SOX auditing means “super secure and careful accounting”. SOX is a specific law with the motivation of giving markets more confidence in public stocks (for example must hire external auditors, certain board member rules, how certain assets must be valued, etc). The SOX audit is to make sure that law is followed. One criticism of SOX is that encouraged many startups and other businesses to remain private. So long story short, no. Our government does not resemble a public stock corporation and these things don’t have an analog.
- epistasis 2y ago> One criticism of SOX is that it partially nationalizes control of the organization, If that is a criticism of SOX for private companies, then it would mean that it should be a baseline for national accounting, no?
- liontwist 2y ago> it should be a baseline for national accounting What does this mean? Let me repeat. SOX is not a method of accounting, its rules about roles and reporting for public corporations > It sounds like you think SOX auditing means “super secure and careful accounting”.
- epistasis 2y agoYes, rules and roles for reporting, ie accounting. I don't know what you think you are implying with the "super secure and careful" comment, we are looking for the roles that ensure the accountability of SOX. Your complaint is that SOX "nationalizes" companies because apparently it becomes so transparent, or something? If that's what you mean by "nationalize" shouldn't that be used for our nation's accounting?
- weard_beard 2y agoI specifically meant the parts of SOX related to access controls, infrastructure, and codebase management to ensure a baseline level of security for processing payments and PII to ensure this does not represent a risk to the valuation of the enterprise. These measures are universal to running any payment platform, not a public/private issue. *No, I'm not thinking of PCI, but that is also a valid measure here. There are recent updates to SOX in the past few years covering these aspects of payment operations. Some old-school SOX experts may not be familiar and the strictness on these aspects of the audit varies by auditor in my experience. I recently helped a client navigate these developing and responding to a very strict audit process covering their entire IT landscape including process flows, deployment planning and user/role management.
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- Bloating 2y agoSame could be said about health & retirement benefits
- cdme 2y agoI’m not sure 19 year olds using gmail addresses are concerned with SOX.
- liontwist 2y agoI’m not sure you know what SOX is.
- hyperbrainer 2y agoTo be fair, no 19 year old in the world concerns himself with audits or proper regulatory procedure, including law students. There is a reason proper structure exists
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fastball 2y agoThe DoD has already been failing audits[1] for a while now. [1] https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit-in-a-row-eyes-passing-grade-by-2028/ https://breakingdefense.com/2024/11/pentagon-fails-7th-audit...
- cdme 2y agoElon and his inexperienced cronies are the last people who should be trusted with any government access. They don’t even have clearance.
- fastball 2y agoI don't think you need clearance for this, so not sure how that is relevant.
- Glyptodon 2y agoI've read in multiple articles that people were placed on leave for trying to require proper clearances from him and his team as obligated to by law, and this article also references how clearances impact the fact that nobody knows what they're actually doing.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoAs someone who has had to clear an SF86 for a USDS hiring cycle (IRS and DHS systems), I would be shocked if you can get this access without a clearance.
- mathw 2y agoIf they don't have clearance aren't they committing a number of offences under various acts of national security and computer misuse and thus liable for arrest?
- liontwist 2y agoAre they making new accounting records?
- cdme 2y agoOf course not. They’re wreaking having based on Elon’s whims. Much like when he drove Twitter into the ground.
- mc32 2y ago[flagged]
- malfist 2y agoWhy do you think the spending of the government isn't already publicly available? Because it is.
- headsman771 2y agoThe only thing thats public is highly abstracted and euphamistic descriptions of where the money is going. Any FOIAs seeking more granular information would be politely asked to stop asking. After all if this information is classified and relating to national security why would it be handed out?
- queuebert 2y agoNot in a practically accessible way for the majority of people.
- macNchz 2y agoIs this not practically accessible? https://www.usaspending.gov/ https://www.usaspending.gov/
- woooooo 2y agoNot sure if you realize, but the federal budget is already public and anybody can FOIA additional details..
- mc32 2y agoSo why can’t they pass an audit?
- fzeroracer 2y agoWhy would you trust the man who's been heavily subsidized by the government to do an audit? A significant chunk of Elon Musk's money came from government contracts his companies had with the US government.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- solumunus 2y agoIt’s a straight up coup.
- zikduruqe 2y agoFrom "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German about what it was like living during the rise of the Nazis: Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.” And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have. But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait. But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
- duped 2y agoI think Elon Musk and his lackeys' action is literally criminal, but law enforcement work for the same team. And Congress is controlled by the same team.
- queuebert 2y agoThat is literally the power of the Executive, to choose which laws to enforce and which to not. Congress makes the laws, and the Courts adjudicate. That is the whole basis of the federal government.
- duped 2y agoI mean that's what they teach 8th graders but it's reductive. Congress makes plenty of laws that restrict how the executive performs its functions (including how they allow people within the executive to do so), and it's an open question over how much power the executive has to create departments and appoint people to run them. At the moment though, what they're doing is very much illegal. They just have a bunch of collaborators in the DOJ who won't bring charges or arrest anyone, because they're co-conspirators.
- queuebert 2y agoThe 8th-grader understanding is that each branch does what it's supposed to do with virtuous motives. The adult understanding is that they exercise as much power as they can until forced to stop.
- XorNot 2y agoI mean if that was true then the current situation wouldn't be happening. The story of the US Congress over the last two decades (probably longer) is they have ceded an enormous amount of power to the Executive via inaction, and continue to do so. The problem with simplistic narratives where you give stuff names is it masks what's actually happening: the Executive is near enough to a dictatorship - power and authority is deliberate vested in one person. This makes it very different to Congress, which only wields power by the collective decision making of hundreds via majority or even super-majority vote. So "Congress" doesn't really exist as an entity: because there is no guiding consciousness or collective in it which is deliberately trying to seize more power, and the story of its power is the exact opposite: it keeps giving it away (because the individual members of Congress can only retain that position and it's local benefits by staying in Congress, best accomplished by deliberately avoiding responsibility of any kind). If you've ever tried to get 4 people to decide what to get for dinner, the guy who simply says "Let's get tacos" usually gets his way because everyone else keeps deferring.
- nessbot 2y agoand it's looking like a legit CONSTITUTIONAL crisis.
- queuebert 2y agoHow so?
- nessbot 2y agoThe executive branch can't decided what to spend, only congress can. Its in the first article of the constitution.
- queuebert 2y agoIt's not that simple. Congress can't specify every pen and pencil expense, so they allocate large buckets. The executive can decide how each bucket is spent. Like when your mom gives you $20 to go to the movies. She doesn't care what movie you see, but she'd be mad if you skipped the movies and spent it on weed.
- nessbot 2y agoAnd what they are doing now is "skipping the movies and spending it on weed." Shutting down USAID, even if eventually Rubio came in and rolled that back is what you just described. That was an office created by congress.
- b112 2y agoNo, what they're doing is skipping the movie, saving up money, hiring a lawyer, so mom loses the right to say "don't spend it on weed".
- abracadaniel 2y agoA better analogy might be that mom bought groceries for the starving family down the road with a check and you cancelled the check, stole the checkbook, and changed the bank account password.
- netbioserror 2y ago[flagged]
- neutrinobro 2y ago[flagged]
- Volundr 2y agoAuditors don't need write access to the system. And audits absolutely do include a careful accounting of who has access and what is being accessed.
- tlb 2y agoIt's shocking how many billions of spending are completely unaudited. Official gov't auditors have tried for years, but the target agencies stall and stall. You have to assume there is some malfeasance there. Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.
- mikeodds 2y ago1 billion sent to the fluffer
- cdme 2y agoI wouldn’t trust a 19 year old to do my taxes let alone audit all of federal spending.
- reustle 2y agoThose are a couple of people within a much larger team.
- cdme 2y agoRanging from 19-24.
- ubercore 2y agoMuch larger? How much larger? I thought it was a pretty small group.
- krainboltgreene 2y agoI wouldn't trust my teenager with a "large" team of people in control of the federal payments system.
- liontwist 2y ago[flagged]
- belter 2y agoIf you were panicked when a developer at GitLab accidentally deleted the production database, just wait until some coder merges a half-tested patch into the Treasury’s production environment. The Musk bros might lose the US ability to reassure the global bond market... Hopefully Spacex has policies with this Dutch Insurance company...:https://youtu.be/3r7mIDycJsE https://youtu.be/3r7mIDycJsE
- basementcat 2y agoCongress was elected by the people and in a representative democracy, the voters decide (through their elected representatives) what is a crime.
- thrance 2y agoThe voters don't directly decide what is a crime. At best, they elect congress that can change the laws and constitution that in turn rules out what is or isn't illegal. None of this was done, none of this is democratic. This is nothing else than a coup perpetrated by the richest man on Earth.
- basementcat 2y agoI’m sure the current Supreme Court (which was selected by elected Presidents and Senators) will have no trouble explaining how recent events have been "reasonable" and 100% followed constitutional procedures.
- lazyasciiart 2y agoNah, this kind of thing is fun for judges who know what decision they want to make. It’s like a logic puzzle.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago>the voters decide (through their elected representatives) what is a crime In the long term yes, in the short term, no. That's the check and balance of the Judicial branch. In theory they should be insulated from the politics of the world and properly interpret laws based on various cases. So you can't just, say, repeal the first amendment just because all your voters suddenly became anti-1A. They need to work to make a represenative base that can eventually vote in that new amendment. And that all takes time (in terms of culture and the bill proposal).
- normalaccess 2y agoAs far as I can tell Elon has had security clearance since 2019 because Space X was (and still is) contracted to do work for the DOD. However I don't know what kind of clearance it was at that time. Please correct me If I'm wrong.
- cozzyd 2y agoI thought he famously couldn't get the top level of clearance and has to sit out of certain spacex activity
- nosioptar 2y agoCozzyd is right: > The Wall Street Journal reported citing people familiar with the matter that SpaceX lawyers recommended that the company's leadership not pursue a higher security clearance for Musk because he would have been asked about contacts with foreign officials as well as his prior drug use. https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/why-elon-musk-doesnt-have-access-all-spacexs-top-secret-work-report https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/why-elon-musk-doesnt-ha... (Didn't link WSJ article due to paywall.)
- Izkata 2y agoYour link confirms GP is correct: > Musk holds a "top secret" clearance that gives him access to some of SpaceX's sensitive programs.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tmaly 2y agoI think he should open the data and methods minus any PII data and let the open community decide if his methods are sound.