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I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use
by comrade1234 4mo ago
I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use up the budget of the client. Although this is normal in the private sector I told him from the beginning that you can't do this on a government project.
The project was $1M+ which was enough for prison time. He had gone into our billing software and edited my entries - it wasn't as if he was submitting the fraudulent totals only - he was changing what I was entering.
I gathered as much documentation as I cloud and went to a law firm. They told me I had two options - report it to the Government Accounting Office or report it to the head of the project, an academic.
So I simultaneously resigned and reported it to the professor. I covered my butt. I'm pretty sure the professor hid the fraudulent billing but I didn't look into afterwards because basically that was what I was hoping he'd do so I wouldn't have to go to court and defend that my reported hours weren't really mine.
The full project was eventually awarded to another academic group.
- idiotsecant 4mo agoThat was your mistake. The grant recipient or department has as much incentive to fully spend the money as your consultant boss does to bill it. It's a implied understanding. Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. Expensive projects are important projects. Important projects make careers. That is baked in several layers deep. You'd need to report it to a waste and fraud line, ombudsman, or similar. I'm not sure its unusual enough to bother, though.
- SecretDreams 4mo agoThis is all simultaneously true and simultaneously disappointing. It requires a certain forfeiture of morality to be a part of this status quo. But, especially on grants between academia and the government, this very much seems to be the status quo.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4mo agoIs it actually true, or just a trope? Anyone in a position to manage hundreds of millions worth of projects is smart enough to know that some projects will run under budget.
- pet_the_bird 4mo agoThe Dutch University of Delft systematically 'maximized' grants and shuffled the money between projects, according to investigative journalists of the NRC[1]. 1 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/02/15/het-subsidiepotje-moet-leeg-wetenschappers-tu-delft-zochten-jarenlang-grenzen-op-om-subsidies-te-maximaliseren-a4190305 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/02/15/het-subsidiepotje-moet-...
- sokoloff 4mo agoI work with people who are well smart enough to know that. It’s also still a reasonable question to ask “well, last year we budgeted $15M and you got acceptable results while spending only $14M; perhaps you only need $14M/yr…” And despite its reasonableness, many people would prefer to oversee a $15M/yr budget.
- jaredsohn 4mo agoI think a reason for this is suppose the next year you run into some difficulties so it requires 14.2M. Now you have to fight to request an extra 0.2M added to your budget that you wouldn't have to worry about if you had 15M.
- sokoloff 4mo agoTotally! And it drives me crazy to get very few questions and mostly positive ones if I underspend by 5-10% but going over by 1-2% is a massive problem. It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.
- Paracompact 4mo agoI work as a federal contractor. It's very true (epistemic status: my managers and project leads tell me as much and I act accordingly, I don't deal with it directly nor understand the bureaucratic larger picture). You will not get funding from Department X again if you ask for more money on a project than you wind up spending. Now, is that the sin of overquoting, or the virtue of overdelivering? For some reason, every agency treats it as the former, and I haven't the foggiest idea why. My coworkers acknowledge how stupid and perverse of an incentive it is, yet treat it like a fundamental force of nature. Most solutions to this problem are essentially what the OP recognized as nakedly illegal---that is, exaggerating productive hours---but most contractors are savvy enough to do it in less auditable and more positively regarded ways, such as stretching out timelines (four 20-hour work weeks raise fewer flags than one 80-hour week), adding more chefs than the kitchen calls for, or funding unnecessary little side projects. Straight-up tampering with timecards is an impatient and dangerous way of achieving (IMO) the same wasteful evil as happens everywhere else in the public and private sector.
- comrade1234 4mo agoI decided to take the advice of my lawyers who specialized in the topic of government projects. Based on the budget someone could have easily gone to prison and it probably would have been me because it looked like I was billing 80-hours a week when it was just one of many projects and so I was actually billing ~20/wk. The $1M threshold wasn't an anecdote - at the time it really was the limit in project size for prison time.
- zulux 4mo agoYou would have been fine: Your pay stubs reflected the correct time and your correct payment.
- comrade1234 4mo agoI was salary.
- zulux 4mo agoShit. That does make it hard. I suspect you made the right move to protect yourself from drama.
- carlosjobim 4mo agoThen why would you bill fraudulent hours if it didn't increase your pay?
- tasty_freeze 4mo agoAges ago, my girlfriend at the time worked for a company that routinely got SIBR (small business innovation research) grants. Such grants made up part of her total workload. The crazy thing was that if she worked for 10 hours on SBIR stuff, then worked 40 hours on her normal work stuff (so overtime), the SBIR billing would get scaled down to 8 hours (that is, 25% of 40 hours). There would be no way to bill 80 hours. The other thing that seemed somewhat crazy is that it was also common to have multiple SBIR contracts going on at the same time. If they bought a $10K tool for SBIR grant #1 and SBIR grant #2 needed it two, they'd have to buy a second one. So the tool would be out, then when switching between work on the grants, the tool would go into a locked cabinet, then the second copy of the tool would get unlocked from a different cabinet. I understand that firewalling like that prevents a company from "borrowing" expensive equipment for their own work, but it lead to waste like I just described.
- fyredge 4mo ago> Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. I've always heard of this nugget of wisdom but never really understood it. By punishing those who underspend (by making the next application harder), wouldn't you incentivise inflated research costs, or worse, fraud. Seems like a quick path to a positive feedback loop towards the degradation of trust in academic spending, leading to "poor government efficiency".
- Paracompact 4mo agoIt makes zero sense to me either, yet it is an omnipresent influence in who gets tasked to what in my work. At my level, I do not know anyone who endorses it, they merely react to it.
- spwack 4mo agoThink of it the other way: If you have been given a $1 million budget, as a manager, your job is to purchase $1 million of Useful Stuff. The rank above you has decided "we need $1 million of software, go buy that." They don't know exactly how much stuff costs, so they use a dollar value as a rough proxy. If, as manager, you cut corners to save money, you're doing the wrong thing. They want the software! They don't to keep want the money, that's why it was allocated in the budget. Go buy us more Useful Stuff!
- em-bee 4mo agoi think anther scenario is more likely: you say you need a 1 million budget to run the IT department, but you only spend part of it, then next year if you ask for 1 million again, they will say, but last year you only spent 700k, so we are going to give you only that much. but the problem here is how budgets are assigned. instead of a fixed number it should have a lower and an upper bound. at least X, but no more than Y. the closer to you get the better, but next year the budget will be the same range. only if you drop below X you run into the above problem, but then it's much less likely and if you really spend that little something else is wrong or the budget really was to high.
- charcircuit 4mo agoBut if someone doesn't need a big budget it makes sense to decrease it. It reduces efficiency if you force yourself to spend the whole budget.
- yCombLinks 4mo agoBut what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?
- charcircuit 4mo agoThen you can argue why you still need the budget. It May make sense to temporarily allocate a bigger budget immediately to do those things instead of delaying, trying to save.
- idiotsecant 4mo agoCongratulations. Your budget is now permanently smaller because your appeals are completely irrelevant to the machine and you get to do less. Forever. Maybe you have to fire some people.
- charcircuit 4mo agoIf you don't need a big budget then yes you should continue onwards with a smaller budget. That's not a surprising conclusion.
- IIsi50MHz 4mo agoI believe the intended meaning was "Now, regardless of any future considerations, your budget is permanently smaller.".
- christophilus 4mo agoYou buy it with financing in that case. And you fit your reductions and hires into the same fiscal year.
- talon8635 4mo agoOkay… do you not feel culpable at some point? Do you feel no obligation to expose these various individuals fleecing the tax payers? Your boss, the academics, and everyone else who participated or knows and remains silent. Obviously, you are now in the later group. Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
- comrade1234 4mo agoIt was too risky. My boss was scummy and even though I had documentation about my hours being edited he would have fought it and we'd go to court and at that point it'd be a crap shoot. If I remember right, the prison time was five years and there is no parole with federal sentences.
- Buttons840 4mo agoTo prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts. In this case, either (1) the peon was lying about reported hours, the boss didn't notice, and then the peon reported himself... or (2) everything happened just like you said. Aren't there bounties for reporting things like this? At the very least winning should include reimbursement for legal expenses.
- vkou 4mo agoThey do get the benefit of the doubt, but when you're a defendant in a criminal trial, simply having the benefit of the doubt on your side will not mean that you're going to have a great experience with it.
- benjiro29 4mo agoAll your going to end up with this type of cases is: * Years of stress * Years of financial losses because lawyers are not cheap. And no matter how well you are innocent, not having a lawyer is guaranteed that you will fail. * Years of time wasting. And for what? The government maybe sentencing a guy for fraud. When its like 90%+ he will strike a sweetheart deal with the prosecutor. Even worse in a case like this where its almost your word vs the boss his word. Yea, you can be the guy that ends up living under a bridge while the CEO laughs his way to the bank, being able to pin it on you. Its already difficult with some proof... Dealing with this type of fraud case reporting, is easier when your not in the spotlight of the crime, and then reporting it. But if your unwilling part of it, few people want their neck on the line.
- dfedbeef 4mo agoSomeone hasn't heard of qui tam
- derektank 4mo agoQui tam (and the federal false claims act) are brilliant, such an elegant solution to a classic problem in government (corruption).
- hiAndrewQuinn 4mo agoThe False Claims Act is one of my favorite things in the world, hands down. Who would have guessed that paying whistleblowers a fraction of the proceeds for high stakes financial crime would be so effective? Well, aside from every economist and financier who ever lived, I mean.
- murphyslaw 4mo agoThank you for this tidbit of information!
- bandrami 4mo agoThat's particularly egregious because there's a time-honored way to do this legally, namely have you shave yaks for 80 hours a week towards the end of the fiscal year (lot of USG contractors are skipping their vacations this summer for that exact reason).
- truemotive 4mo agoYeah, this is important to look out for, one way to tell it is probably happening is if the contractor has the word 'Labs' at the end of the LLC name.