Comment by comrade1234
21 hours 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.
That'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).
Okay… 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.
Do people really have a duty to fix every wrong in the world? He reported it to the project head, and resigned. He ensured he wasn't a part of the situation.
I don't think you have to be a full saint to fulfil your moral obligations. He ensured he wasn't implicitly participating and reported it to someone who had a responsibility to investigate/do something about it. That is a reasonable amount of effort to rectify the situation in my opinion.
> Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
The person you are responding to did "blow the whistle". They reported it to the project head. That is blowing the whistle.
They didn't blow the whistle though, not really.
Especially not when gp said that they expected the department head to brush it under the rug. If reporting things "up the chain of command" was really expected to root corruption out, and this fraud is 100% a form of corruption, then whistle blowing simply wouldn't be needed.
They covered their own ass, which is fine, in that later the head can't say they didn't know about it. But they didn't blow the whistle.
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If you don’t have a duty to report, you don’t have a duty to report. You can’t predict what government prosecutors will do. If they start investigating and it turns out for whatever reason they can’t pin it on the boss, they could have pinned if on OP.
Think about it logically. If you’re the prosecutor, the guy whose time is fraudulent is presumptively the criminal. It could very well be that he was actually the one who was engaged in the fraud, but went to the authorities to protect himself by making it look like his boss did it.
Yours is unfortunately the attitude which breeds corruption, and also the attitude of the majority of people. "Not my problem", "not my duty", "covering my own ass", "not getting into trouble" and so on. The reptilian minded people like OPs boss love having you guys around, because they can't do their unethical schemes just by themselves, and you won't make a fuss.
As for the prosecutor; he is first and foremost interested in where the money went. If fraudulent hours didn't give OP an extra paycheck boost, then that money went somewhere else.
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Absolutely not. Honor does not pay the mortgage. Whistleblowers have no real protection, despite laws saying they should. If you blow that whistle, you will be retaliated against, guaranteed.
What you know and what you can prove are different things.
I think most people would blow the whistle if they had evidence of personal-enrichment fraud. Suspecting that incentives are producing strange outcomes is one thing; accusing specific people of criminal conduct is quite another.
Hilariously, in the one case I heard about where an MD was eventually fired for taking kickbacks from contractors, the department then struggled to recruit competent staff. It turned out he had only been skimming from people who could actually do the job.
Now that you know, do you feel culpable?
He just knows that someone on HN who is not using their real name has described witnessing government fraud at some unspecified point in the past and reporting it to the head of the project. He doesn't have any information about where it occurred other than probably the United States.
He's not really in a position to act usefully on this information, so had no reason to feel any culpability for not acting. It is only an interesting question when put to people were in a position where they had to make a choice.
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I'm supposed to dox this person or something? What are you asking exactly?
It 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.
To 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.
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hell no! CYA and See'ya! You should try to avoid anything to do with government investigations.
Easier to say than do.
> Okay… do you not feel culpable at some point?
1. No mens rea.
2. He did what was expected of him.
3. You're always free to break into prison if you find yourself in his position, but you might discover yourself sitting in a pool of shit that was not of your own making.
4. Do you really want the parent poster to face the possibility of criminal prosecution, because his scumbag boss convinces the DOJ that the parent poster were the one fucking with the hours, and tried to pin it on him?
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Honestly, having been to high trust places like Singapore for a decent amount of time - it's better to live in a low trust society. Singapore is easily one of the most boring, sad, depressing places on earth despite it being on paper a paradise according to education, health care, etc rates.
High trust in society correlates strongly with being anti-innovative. Europe is going through another lost decade in a row because it got too addicted to social democracy. The fastest growing parts of Europe are some of the lowest trust (i.e. Poland). Please fleece the tax payer more.
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Someone hasn't heard of qui tam
Qui tam (and the federal false claims act) are brilliant, such an elegant solution to a classic problem in government (corruption).
The 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.
Thank you for this tidbit of information!
That 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.
I 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.
Ages 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.
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You would have been fine: Your pay stubs reflected the correct time and your correct payment.
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Wait, did you get paid overtime when he modified your time sheet?
I guess it may not be normal but I got straight time overtime when I worked for a contractor. Made those weeks I really did do 80 hrs nice. But if they have any system involved the fact you did not get paid for the time would be a big red flag.
If you were salary and not benefitting from it, there's literally no chance you would have gone to jail. This was the equivalent of panicking about running a yellow light in terms of overreaction. The only thing you had to do was write an email, cc your personal email, and tell your boss you think the punches are messed up and that they reflect more than you worked. Your boss would tell you not to worry about it and you're done.
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> 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".
It 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.
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But 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.
But 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?
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This 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.
Is 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.
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