Comment by tptacek

21 days ago

The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question.

It's very annoying that I feel like I have to say this but: I'm a committed Democrat, and I feel like my anti-Trump anti-racism bona fides, including on this site, are quite solid. The Minnesota thing happened. We can debate the scale, but it happened.

16 comments

tptacek

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wredcoll  21 days ago

My ultimate take on the article is "so what?"

Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article.

I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't.

If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower standard of evidence before taking action.

Is there something I'm missing?

  • amiga386  20 days ago

    My take-away from the article is a bunch of fraud-identifying and fraud-thwarting tips.

    Ideally, state programs should:

    1. not pay out until a beneficiary's bona-fides are first verified. Paying out first, with no verification, and only retrospectively trying to claw back fraudulent claims, only after expensive investigations, is ruinous on the state budget.

    2. work with private industry to identify alleged fraudsters

    3. require much more verification of alleged fraudsters before agreeing to pay anything out

    4. snoop around to find fraudsters' abettors because they're easier to find than the fraudsters

    Other than one section saying that fraud investigators should expect to find ethnic clusters (because fraudsters of all ethnicities use their families and friends), there's nothing about ethnicity being a "flag". The biggest flag is that the same person previously committed fraud, and the article laments that civic government often gives a "clean sheet" to known fraudsters, in a way that the finance industry never would.

  • saint_fiasco  20 days ago

    There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.

    The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.

    A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.

    But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.

    • wredcoll  20 days ago

      I agree, but you've already mentioned the issues with the government having a punishment system that isn't based on the courts. We all know how great the secret no-fly list is.

  • zahlman  20 days ago

    > If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity

    This is not a fair or reasonable conclusion from what the article actually says.

  • blurbleblurble  21 days ago

    That's what I'm getting from this article too. It's giving "Nick Shirley in the style of lots of extra words".

blurbleblurble  21 days ago

Did you read the actual report? The part about how a single investigator didn't like how some daycares were run, the level of supervision, and then used that to extrapolate a hypothetical invalidation of all payments to those facilities as "fraudulent"?

Democrats have rationalized much worse things than this, for example the ethnic cleansing (genocide) in Gaza. So with all due respect frankly I'm not at all assuaged by your caveat.

dtornabene  21 days ago

[flagged]

  • arduanika  20 days ago

    > (unless you have gone back and deleted the comments, haven't checked yet!)

    Minor point: I'm pretty sure that HN comments cannot be deleted/edited after about an hour. Very different from most web forums in this regard, and worth keeping in mind when digging into past discussions! Maybe the rules are different for a superuser like tptacek here with lots of karma, but I doubt it.

    Correct me if I'm wrong.