Watching everybody I know on the left pontificating about the proper way to conduct audits, after getting their accounting degrees from the University of Internet this week, is absolute cringe for me.
Guys, listen, I say this with love… You don’t know dick about shit and it’s fucking embarrassing. Just stop. You sound like idiots.
So now, as a guy who used to be an auditor, who has defended companies from dozens of audits from different government agencies, I’ll try to correct some of your incredibly stupid NPC talking points you keep endlessly barfing up.
First off, you need to know there’s a difference between an outside audit and an internal audit. An outside audit is when somebody who isn’t part of your company comes in and checks your stuff. This could be one of the fifty something government agencies that audit people/businesses, or this could be an outside CPA firm making sure you are in compliance for some reason (like the company is publicly traded). I’ll talk more about what CPAs are in a minute.
Then there are internal audits, where the person in charge has his own people audit his company, looking for problems, hoping to have everything in order before those 3rd party outsiders show up to check, or searching for fraud, waste, and abuse… You know, those annoying things that tend to screw you over and put you out of business. That’s the kind of auditing I mostly did.
An internal audit is what Donald Trump (the man in charge) is doing now, by having his people (DOGE) audit the executive branch he runs. CEOs and owners do this all the time.
You do not need to be a Certified PUBLIC Accountant to be part of an internal audit team.
In fact, even most CPA firms, auditing the biggest corporations in the world, the majority of the auditors doing the grunt work are NOT CPAs. Most government auditors are not CPAs.
CPA is a particular certification required for a few particular types of accounting, and that isn’t even close to what DOGE is doing.
Also most of the auditors for those big firms are YOUNG. They are usually around 24, because those are the dudes that the big firms can work 80 hours a week and they won’t just keel over and die. They do this kind of work BEFORE taking the CPA exam if they want to go that route, and most of them don’t, because they end up going from auditing into some other form of specialty.
These young auditors make up a team which is usually supervised by an NCO type who has got 5-7 years of experience (and may or may not be a CPA depending on the industry) and they all answer to somebody higher up, who has got the 10-20 years of experience. This will of course vary on the size of the company.
You do NOT need to be an accountant to be an auditor. Anybody who says this is a total dumb ass with zero grasp of how any of this shit works in real life. The people who make up your audit team are recruited from whatever skill sets are necessary to audit that particular system. I (the accountant) have been on audit teams with IT guys, programmers, lawyers, and even machinists. (why machinists, because I was auditing a factory, and I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were bullshit or not)
So if you are auditing a computer system, then your auditors would obviously require computer people. Fucking duh, morons. Holy shit. The reason most auditors come from an accounting background is because most fraud, waste, and abuse comes from fuckery on the books. But if the fuckery is taking place in the particular systems before they get to the financials, that’s where we bring in systems experts.
Next, you morons are acting like the entire organization is half a dozen 20 somethings, because that’s who got doxxed first and you fuckers are too stupid or dishonest to realize that’s not the entire team. Newsweek has compiled a list of known DOGE staff so far, and their ages are 33, 42, 28, 34, 67, 30, 33, 36, 33, 47, 25, 24, 43, 23, 25, 45, 19, 28, 21, 44, 39, 57, 45, 41, 32, 28, 22, 37, 37, 35, 24, 42, 36, and 36.
https://www.newsweek.com/doge-list-staff-revealed-2029965
Do I need to graph that for you, you dishonest fucks? The wiz kids you keep histrionically shitting your pants over aren’t even the average. Oh, and shocker, they also come from a wide variety of backgrounds, like everybody with a fucking clue about auditing had already assumed because we aren’t retards.
But but but Elon is posting things on Twitter that aren’t 100% perfectly accurate according to liberal fact checkers from liberal news organizations which up until recently have been receiving large amounts of tax payer money for phony baloney reasons!
So what?
The stuff that’s been made public so far is what’s called findings. Findings aren’t the final report. That takes time. And you’ll probably never see those final reports because again, say it with me, INTERNAL. The only way you’ll ever see the complete detailed final report for any given agency is Donald Trump feels like it. Same as any CEO can drop whatever internal company info he feels like.
But DOGE is going TOO FAST! Well no shit. They are on a tight time frame. The republicans control everything right now (barely, and many of them are every bit as corrupt as the dems) only the government is fucking huge, Trump got elected on cutting it, and mid terms are in two years.
But (insert sob story here about how some good necessary wonderful saint of a government employee or super awesome wonderful government program got cut here) REEEEE!!!! Except too bad that’s total bullshit.
The time for a gentle, caring, measured (slow), careful pruning of government to only remove the bad tissue with a scalpel was generations ago. We are now at the axe and TQ time before the patient dies. Yeah, that sucks, but that’s what happens when you procrastinate going to the doctors while a cancerous tumor the size of a fucking watermelon grows out your back.
Those last two NPC wails are basically the same thing, appeals for Trump to slow down and lose momentum so the process can stall out and die like all the previous times Americans have tried to cut the great federal leviathan and shut off the endless money faucet.
The government is huge. Our debt is insane. This is not sustainable. We know it. They know it. Everybody knows it. I don’t know why everybody keeps pretending otherwise.
Sure, this government program is an obvious scam to funnel tax dollars to bureaucrats and their NGO friends, so cat ladies in Arlington can collect $700k salaries at the “charity” run out of her multimillion dollar town home, but if we cut that a single puppy will die!
I feel bad for the Hostage Puppy. I really do. But don’t blame the auditors who are finding this shit, and don’t blame the tax payers who are tired of getting butt fucked. If you were honest you’d blame the bureaucrats and grifters who got us to this place.
Will government programs you like get cut? Absolutely. Will this suck for a lot of people? Yes. Will good hard working employees get cut along with the legions of useless fucking dregs? Yup. Is this still necessary so our entire nation doesn’t collapse into utter dog shit under the weight of the all consuming federal leviathan, where to survive we huddle in the ruins eating rats cooked over piles of burning dollar bills? Also yes.
They’re called budget cuts because they hurt. If they were pleasant they would be called budget tickles.
Next, Elon now has access to our personal data! REEEEEE! Which is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, because if Elon wanted all our personal data he could just buy it off the Communist Chinese, from one of the last seven times our incompetent and unaccountable federal government leaked all our data, for way cheaper. This is just idiotic obfuscation.
Then there’s this one where Elon dropped a finding to the tax payers that showed our Social Security data has a bunch of nonsensical garbage in it. Immediately some random dumbfuck on Twitter came up with an excuse. BUT WHAT ABOUT COBOL REEEEEEE!
Man, fuck your COBOL.
Because what happened next was hilarious and fascinating, because it didn’t matter how retarded and full of shit that COBOL excuse was, or how many hundreds of computer programmers went “that’s fucking bullshit that’s not how any of that works you idiots” the NPC lemming brigade immediately ran with it, repeating it over and over like a religious mantra. Because the validity of the excuse doesn’t matter. They just need an excuse. Any excuse will do. It’s like a holy symbol to ward off vampires, only this time they’re holding up a turd to ward off DOGE.
Back to auditing, just because the Social Security database is filled with garbage doesn’t mean that all that garbage is fraud. However, try that excuse when the government audits you. “Oh, I’m sorry my books are riddled with errors, it is no big deal, that’s just how we do things around here.” and see how that shakes out for you.
If a company’s records were full of broken bullshit, the government would assume the worst, fine the ever living fuck out of you, and possibly send you to jail. Because the government’s default assumption when a company’s books are all fucked up is that it is on purpose to hide fraud.
Except when our government’s books are filled with things like 30 million dollars to fund a Transsexual Peruvian Orchestra, and 99% of that money never made it out of northern Virginia, we’re supposed to assume that’s just nice fluffy goodness, and HOW DARE YOU assume there’s anything dishonest going on.
Oh yeah, the whole “but even if we fire Y% government employees” that’s only X% of the budget and there’s still all this other stuff.” Which is just pathetic obfuscation from people upset the endless money faucet is getting shut off, because all those millions add up and turn into billions, and all those billions add up and turn into trillions. This one was also more popular among the NPCs before they started poking at the entitlements which are the giant money holes and finding all sorts of wonky shit there too.
Am I missing any of the NPC wails? Point them out in the comments and I’ll add them and rip on them too.
I used to work at a national security graduate school in DC. Government-adjacent and academic — and all the academics were active or retired public servants.
Holy crap, they had blinders on. That was good for the most part, because the stuff they were teaching needed to be focused; but sometimes they combined the absolute WORST of academia and government, and it was supposed to be my job to handle academic communications for them. I was NOT confident in the people we were training and I kept pushing for better standards.
I’m talking things like yes, our students need to learn to write a fucking paper. Yes, there’s something called grammar. I got told this might hurt their feelings.
I eventually got downsized a week before my wedding.
I’d dearly love to see their books today.
Please tell me you’re not talking about the National War College…
Sooooo… Bagging the cash and and heading for Panama ISN’T the way?
A really smart woman I knew stopped getting her Education major because she was told to not correct black kids’ bad grammar.
Let’s see. I have seen that starving children will die, AIDS will resurface, the FBI will no longer do community outreach, Elon is trying to harass the agencies that regulate his businesses, Elon has massive conflicts of interest, the monetary amounts are miniscule overall, the outgoing government employees were all Constitution following patriots (the Atlantic), fear and disorder now rule and reign in fed agencies, the FBI is (now) being weaponized, the IRS is the one government agency that actually is fiscally responsible, we now have a fear based spoils system of patronage and fealty for federal appointments and everything was fine before now.
I’ve seen reasonable arguments that the patronage system is how the federal government was supposed to work. Maybe not a complete change-over, but enough that the new guys have reason to look for shenanigans and get deep enough into the bureaucracy to see them.
even if that were the case … there is a new Patron in charge … he doesn’t want to buy indulgences …
and also, then the folks in charge change with every election, businesses (and unions, and NGOs, etc) won’t want to buy indulgences again every few years
Tell me you don’t know what indulgences are without straight up honestly saying you don’t know what indulgences are.
The patronage system was replaced by the (progressive) notion of a ‘civil service’. Given they’re un-civil and only serve themselves it seems the notion was incorrect.
I’ve seen two additional ones, though they’re both basically variants of the Hostage Puppy.
The first was wailing and gnashing of teeth that Trump is apparently defunding science as a concept, bemoaning how America has always had a strong hatred of intelligence. This, from the group practically bursting into flames with fury at the motivating force behind SpaceX… Hilariously, this came with despairing comments that “now science is going to be whatever the rich and powerful say it is,” from people who I assume just returned a month ago from a round trip to the asteroid belt. I’m not sure how else they missed the past 20 years of the left’s preaching about how “the science is settled” here on Earth.
The second was a bunch of people aghast at how PBS was facing dire straits now that the infinite-money hose is being turned off. Because obviously there is *no way* for the proles to get arts and sciences programming other than having it come in a government box. Unless we send the IRS to collect the funding at gunpoint and cut Big Bird a piece of the action, Elmo will starve in a gutter and the airwaves will apparently contain nothing but pro wrestling or something. It’s like it’s 2012 again all of a sudden – which is fine by me, we could use another batch of Cookie Monster the Mercenary memes.
the fun thing about PBS is that people are arguing both:
it’s a trivial portion of the PBS budget, so it’s not worth bothering with
and
if you cut this money, you will shut down PBS entirely
It’s even more stupid because anyone who has had a family shortfall – job loss, big expenses, extra baby, whatever – knows you cut small stuff first. Stop eating out, less toys, etc. Easier to do and might save some of the big stuff.
Here’s a wacky thought. What if PBS started buying… COMMERCIAL AIR TIME?
I WANT to see Elmo starve in a gutter! A gutter flowing with salty progressive tears! That Little Red Menace ruined Sesame Street and needs to reap what he sowed!
Note that Sesame Street is owned by HBO and the Muppets are owned by Disney. Elmo has nothing to do with PBS anymore.
Sesame Street left PBS in 2016. HBO put it on life support for a while, but they have ended their deal to produce new episodes, and the season airing now will likely be the last unless some white knight rides in.
So all the caterwauling about “OMG poor Bert and Ernie will DIE if you cut funding to PBS!” have no clue what they’re talking about.
It’s a kids show, you could/should show episodes from 20 yrs ago and no kid would notice the difference. It wouldn’t be pushing the latest indoctrination, just ones from 20 yrs ago.
Thus is why Hee Haw stopped making new shows. New show, 20-year old show, ratings were the same.
The one I heard was “Trump is taking access to education from children because he’s closing the Department of Education!”.
The DoE had LOWERED education results ever since it was created.
It’s only existed for about 50 years at most.
And Charter/Private/Home- schooling has gotten better results already.
Science was better when it was a bunch of rich white guys doing it for fun.
“[…] Elmo will starve in a gutter […]”
Things are looking up.
Did you really write that without laughing like a loon as you typed? You’re a better man than I Gunga Din.
Did you really write that without laughing like a loon as you typed? You’re a better man than I Gunga Din.
AIDS already resurfaced! It’s called T-cell depletion. It is caused by the mRNA permanently writing spike code into your DNA. Your immune system fights until it fails through T-cell depletion. You now have AIDS. From the VAXX!
Great statement!
I’m sure not a single one of the people saying “wait their not auditors..” doesn’t hire a CPA to balance their bank account.
Retards!
LOL. That’s precious that you think people still balance their bank accounts. There are a not insignificant number of people who are surprised by monthly “insufficient funds” notices. (I mean they get multiple of them every month. “But… but how can that be?”)
The commercials for services that tell you how many subscriptions you’re paying for and helps you cancel them is proof that a lot of people pay almost no attention to their personal finances.
It blows my mind – how can you not know that you’re paying for three different Netflix accounts? That’s your money, son!
It’s also how there are so many easy marks for that “Your subscription is for [online service] is about to expire” scam that keeps texting me. They don’t have any idea how many services they’re subscribing to, or even the names of those services, so they click without a thought.
Yeah, that one absolutely boggles my mind. I don’t sign up for anything subscription based unless I *plan* to pay the sub…so I’m not likely to forget I had it!!
I can’t be overdrawn. I still have checks!
I’d argue that, but I KNOW you are right.
How do people today know how much they have in the bank?
They take out their phone, and open the Banky-Thingy app. In VERY big numbers, it displays the (usually) sad state of affairs.
Thanks to colored phone displays, they can even see the nasty RED numbers, with a minus sign in front. And, for the REALLY dumb, they have a message that TELLS them they have no money.
It always seems to come as a complete surprise to them. What’s really funny (OK, not that funny) is that when I ask how much they have in their savings account, they display a completely blank look.
Savings? What’s that?
Man, I hope they all get fired and then have to apply to get their jobs back.
Slash it! Slash it!
Maybe they should just learn to code 😀
maybe they should learn to code IN COBOL!
then they could at least fix the (nonexistent) problem in the Social security database that defaults empty dates to 1875 (even though we know thats not whats happening because there are thousands of other suspicious dates that are NOT 1875)
or maybe they should learn to code in cobol because its a ridiculous waste of time to learn such an obsolete language and that would make me laugh.
I’m not sure which explanation is true, but I’m sure they should learn cobol.
The person aged 360-369 years is the one that interests me.
Leave me alone.
-Adam
🤪
Nahh, it’s the Howards families
Hey Great^N grandad keep your mouth shut.
-Methuselah
…and get off my lawn!
Nancy Pelosi, so I hear. Maybe Vlad III can confirm.
How old is Agent Franks?
I think Franks was brought to life around the 1700’s iirc… Dippel was a mad man! You thinking we have Franks running around? Is Stricken resurrecting Nemesis? You think Kurst is making a come back and is trying to take our government down?
The table join to the PUFF exemptions list table is deep in the code, not in the SSN table. That join omits all PUFF-exempt SSNs from results for any query run normally. The reason all the longer aged SSNs are showing up now is the DOGE folks are doing their analysis at the table level, so they are seeing the raw as-maintained data, not the sanitized data normally available through the query-based tools.
Define Agent Franks. First modern report is 1818 but presumably incarnated somewhat earlier to overlap with Franklin. Previously reported very early Common Era as Legion or perhaps part of a large group so called. Creation may be as early as the beginning. Ben Franklin was born 1705/1706 and it may be recorded when he first dealt with Agent Franks but I don’t recall. Likely about French and Indian War time.
Laurell Hamilton probably knows their name. . .
(Blade has entered the chat)
What about Methuselah?
Isn’t he getting his Social Security benefits?
If not, why not?
And you thought Soros was German …
Soros was Hungarian, and not ‘Ethnic German’ enough to qualify for membership in the National Socialist German Workers Party. Which made Georgie very sad.
Was he born in 1666? Maybe…
Were they from Jamestown, VA? Or was it Plymouth Rock? I didn’t look.
I’ll bet a lot of that is fat-fingered data entry that was not caught. You know, when typing in the birthdate from a pad you hit 1632 instead of 1932.
LOL, that happened to me. I checked into a room at a hotel, went to the beach, when I came back my key card didn’t work. The desk clerk wouldn’t reset it. “You checked out.” Took two managers to figure out how to uncheck that box in the system.
COBOL can also do field validation, like for eg not allowing a DOB to be entered that makes a person 300 years old.
If the SS system is not validating DOB correctly, I would suggest it is a feature rather than a bug.
My cousin’s first birth certificate read his birthdate as January 35th, 1924. He was born sometime in June in the early 80s.
His parents only noticed it because they started receiving social security checks, and it took months for a corrected one to be issued (with plenty of back-and-forth with midwits who insisted the original was correct because it was The Official Document).
I wonder what would have happened if they’d just… not spoken up about it.
His name is Duncan Macleod 😉
data is data … whatever program inserted it into the record is almost meaningless … COBOL, C++, Java, Basic whatever … once its in the database its agnostic … now if you want to re-program the input program then you may need some COBOL … (or the output jobs maybe) …
some of the problem is that the software used to input the data does not have sanity checks
or like the Treasury, didn’t require that the expense category of description fields have anything put in them.
Fixing that does require code changes (in whatever language, and yes, I have written COBOL
Would they then be the Lords of COBOL?
If only I could recall the info to Battlestar Galactica right now, LOL
When I was getting my software engineering degree in the early 1980’s, we said COBOL, which actually stands for COmmon Business Oriented Language, stood for Crummy, Obsolete, Badly Organized Language.
By the 1980s, it was common for COBOL to be taught as part of the “business” curriculum, not comp.sci.
Which made reasonable sense if you thought about it; you generally weren’t looking for a COBOL Wizard to write a vast information system from scratch; industry had moved past COBOL. What employers wanted were people who could tweak existing systems to keep them going.
Working on my computer science degree in mid 80s at Georgia Tech.
They offered a COBOL class, but this class could not be used for any credit towards the CS degree, not even free elective.
I took the class my senior year, figured it would be a good language to have in industry. It was taught by one of the IT guys and was mainly management students. The five of us engineering types were told to skip the first week as they were covering the edit-compile-debug cycle.
I do hear that there is an object oriented ‘modern’ COBOL. I’m disappointed that they did not name it “ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.”
And IBM still offers COBOL in their ILE programming family on the iSeries (aka AS/400). You can mash C, C++, CL, RPG, and COBOL modules together into one program.
Turns out there is a shortage of Cobol programmers because most banks, insurance companies, health insurance companies, etc still use mainframe computers that run legacy Cobol programs and they don’t want to migrate to newer platforms because it would cost a lot of money, the project might fail, and what they are using works.
However, as an IT professional with 40+ decades in the field, I can attest that “but Cobol” is a bullshit excuse.
With 40+ decades in the field, you may be about to lose your SS checks.
You can write bad spaghetti code in *any* language…
“Your COBOL application is antiquated and ugly!”
“Yes, but it has 99.99% uptime, and your ‘web stack’ of random toolkits is a teetering Jenga tower requiring continuous maintenance just to mostly stay running. And by the way, your tower is on fire.”
It would take a modern computer jock about two weeks to become a solid COBOL programmer.
It’s not rocket science, it’s not even PYTHON.
Don’t bag on COBOL too much as there are still billions if not trillions of lines of code still humming along. Full Disclosure: I have been a COBOL programmer for over 25 years. My company is working hard to wean itself off the Mainframe/COBOL and onto newer tech infrastructure, but we still have things running that have been running daily or monthly in COBOL on the mainframe since 1996 (When our company converted from a Honeywell Bull machine to an IBM Mainframe machine.) It’s a hard language to kill
Because it will hurt.
I’ve never actually used it, but the fact I have an associates degree in COBOL, RPG, DB2, and SQL on a IBM AS/400 gets me occasional headhunters. It’s been so long I’d be ashamed to take actual money for using it,
Hey! Back in The Day, we did perfectly good intelligence analysis and nuclear target planning with punch-card-fed COBOL programs. But I do hope that none of my mid-70s code is still in production.
Never mind the “learn COBOL” rot. It’s a simple language.
Instead, ask could the DOGE boys learn to ask, “What do the values this field can hold represent?” before the boys shoot their mouths off?! Shooting first then having to answer embarrassing questions later about your competence is no way to run an internal audit.
We’re going to need people to harvest avocado’s.
Out doors, fresh air, you don’t take the job home at the 3nd of the day. And doing something actually useful and of benefit to the community.
…or mine coal…
Every time I took over a new position in the Army, I had to inventory the equipment that I was responsible for. Those inventories are audits, where you examine the property books, hand receipts and physical equipment to ensure that everything is accounted for. In the case of sensitive items (weapons, radios, Night Observation Devices, etc.,), the inventory is done by serial number, and must be 100% accounted for, or you call the FBI. That’s an audit at its most basic, and every officer in the Army is expected to be able to complete one, whether you majored in business, IT or feminist semiotics. It’s not rocket science.
A former Army type once told me there was a magazine called something like “Army Times” that used to have classified ads in the back. “Wanted, location of M48A1 1221.” Which would be a tank.
Just because an armored platoon might have 12 tanks, didn’t always mean they had 12 *specific* tanks. At which point the missing tank had to be found and (hopefully) swapped for the one they had the paperwork for.
How a tank platoon could wind up with the wrong tanks is probably best left as a thought exercise.
I knew a guy who told a story from when he was a mechanic for humvees in the Japan. One day a humvee just shows up in their yard. No paperwork submitted, no idea who it belongs to. They call around to find out who it belongs to, and everyone denies its theirs. They figure “whatever” and shove it into a corner figuring someone will come looking and can actually claim it and request the work be done.
Months go by and it just sits there, when they get word they’re being inspected. They then all realize that they have an unaccounted for humvee sitting intheir yard. Rather than take the ding, they get an excavator and haul it off a ways and bury it.
Good old enlisted efficiency and military accountability right there.
The Army lost one of the MBT70 prototypes in the middle of a field for quite a while. When that project was killed and the new advanced tank program started (that resulted in the M1 Abrams), the MBT70 prototypes were ordered to be destroyed.
Forward X years and “If you’ve ever mowed your yard and found a tank…” It got restored and parked in a museum.
The only surviving (of 2) US T28 Super-Heavy Tank every built was lost in a field for 27 years before being found in 1974, this is a 95 ton tank and they somehow lost it in a field somewhere.
I don’t recall where I read about it so I can’t swear to the authenticity but supposedly there is company or more of Sherman tanks sealed up and buried with fuel and ammo somewhere in the NV/AZ/NM desert, hidden in case the Germans / Japanese overran the coasts.
There was a funny section in Starship Troopers where Johnny has to assume responsibility for the ships inventory. He insists on actually CHECKING the physical items on the list.
And finds that MANY things are missing.
Not necessarily stolen, just lost, left behind when suddenly evacuating, or stuck in a locker somewhere.
Or traded for something a trooper wanted or needed to impress a girl with.
They came clean with their commander, and he helped them. What couldn’t be found, was placed on a list, which got added to the cargo of the next ship to crash, after the fact.
Problem solved.
So instead of lost and having to be found or replaced, it officially got destroyed with another ship.
But a cruiser doesn’t have room for 500 cases of toilet paper…
Wanna bet? You’d be surprised how many boxes of pop tarts you could cram out of sight into a Los Angeles class boat.
A friend was asked to sign for things w/o an inspection, and quite properly, refused. He was in charge of implementation of the logistics for the 82nd, going to Iraq to relieve the 101st.
He had retired from the Army at 20 as an E-8, became a DOD civilian, and at that time was an assimilated Colonel with a reputation for getting whatever was needed done.
The screams were heard to DC, but it was the guy he was relieving that the loads dropped on.
Hey, Mike, it’s been awhile!
Repairable aircraft parts storerooms on aircraft carriers in the Navy are required to be inventoried 100% wall to wall annually, with 100% accuracy required.
I did many of them in my 20 years working Supply in the Navy.
The only thing missing from this is how offensive it should be to every law abiding citizen in this country that our politicians screech about how we the people are not entitled to know where all our tax dollars are going. I watched several geriatric harpies going on about we the people are not entitled to know where all the fraud is coming from.
There are rings of European groups fleecing this country, as well as our own brand of ridiculously heinous corrupt politicians. Yet the propaganda ministry is doing its best to create as much vitriol as it can in order to keep these troglodytes indignant. How dare we the people know how badly we are getting fucked?
There is a book that desperately needs to be written. “THE ONE BULLET MANAGER : MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES OF THE KHMER ROUGE”
Then it needs to be implemented where these corrupt fucks are concerned. Because this level of corruption is what leads to open rebellion.
Anyway, love your books and thanks for writing something that everyone should be reading.
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 9 includes:
No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.
the Constitution requires that the expense records be published.
I’m guessing they (ie, the corruptocrats currently howling) interpreted “from time to time” to mean “someday, maybe. In a century or three. If someone asks the right way.”
Yeah, these days, once funds are pulled from the treasury, they can’t be put back. Like, if the USG hires a contractor to build something for them, and they come in under budget, the leftover money won’t be returned to be reallocated, because that’s too much work, and besides, if any department doesn’t use its whole budget, that means they don’t need it and will get less next time around….
Our Governmental accounting mentality is truly nuts.
Absolutely true. While working at the State department I once was charged with acting as project manager for a couple of seven-figure American embassy upgrades at two different embassies.
Way above my pay grade but what did I know. Any how(after I had to completely redesign the build), I brought the first job in under time and under budget. Did the same on the second one.
Later found out my department head was heard to mutter that I was saving too much money. Fortunately for both of us I had to retire shortly after I finished the second job
Hey Larry,
I assume it’s actually you and not some intern or minion now that you’re a Big Celebrity(TM).
I don’t do F*c*book so I miss out on all the good stuff over there and I miss you (reading your stuff that is) when you don’t post here for a while. I know blogging is pretty much in its death throes, so I appreciate you taking the time to come here and post something for those of us who don’t do anti-social media.
As long as the lights are still on here, I’ll keep coming back to see what’s new. Thanks.
Larry, I say this meaning no disrespect to either of our spouses, but I LOVE YOU, in the most patriotic way possible!!! 😂 🇺🇸❤️
I am *from* the DC ‘burbs and now live in the Free panhandle of FL, where I wanted to be before the Nov ’24 elections b/c I had no confidence in the outcome.
THANK GOD TRUMP WON as decisively as he did because only that TOO BIG TO RIG outcome and his ensuing popularity ratings are what has held the DEMONS at bay.
I am currently working my way through Kurt Schlichter’s books that depict the alternate reality of the U.S. going through a national divorce, and (while he is not as good a writer as you are) he depicts what I think is a credible possibility if Trump wasn’t the magical fellow that he is, to have pulled off the political outcomes that he has achieved.
But Schlichter’s books are CHILLING given how CLOSE we were (and ARE) to that kind of outcome.
(As the former Walking Liverspot in Chief oft said) No joke, man!
Larry, KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK of SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER!
Signed,
The Political Unicorn
🇺🇸
I do like how Kurt’s later books are illustrating that a national divorce would actually be a very bad idea.
You might like Harry Turtldove’s “The Disunited States of America”.
Trump is 0 for 3 in his attempts to win a majority of the nationwide popular vote.
As for the Electoral College vote, a 312 to 226 majority there is a ho-hum result, nothing close to Nixon’s crushing of McGovern in 1972 or Reagan’s similar defeat of Mondale in 1984. A win but a “decisive win” only for meaningless values of “decisive”.
You may want to check your election results…
The anti-Musk PSYOP is in full swing, with plenty of bot accounts going on. The F*cebook algorithm won’t stop dumping anti-Musk posts into my feed with thousands of shrieking comments on each of them. Whenever I see one, I’ll reply to a couple of the comments with whatever sounds inflammatory and fun for blowing up the heads of the NPCs. I’ve been doing this for about two weeks now,
Not one single inflammatory comment that I’ve posted has gotten a single reply, whether angry or “um, aktchually…” or even, “Never thought about that.” Not one.
The bots are churning out PSYOP content at full volume. Somebody (probably a lot of somebodies) is/are VERY SCARED. I’m loving it.
As a libertarian, I want to slash far more of the federal government than most. I don’t think DOGE will do that.
From a competency perspective, of the 30 people listed as DOGE staff, I see one with banking experience and one who worked at the GSA. Most of the others are software engineers. While those people can help with the audit, there don’t appear to be any accountants supervising or advising them.
From a timing perspective, I’ve worked on large, old software systems like those in the government. It takes months to come up to speed on them in the best case, with training from the people who maintain them. Musk’s wunderkind might be smart, but they’re not miracle workers. Reading the source code for a week will, at most, show them the scope of the problem.
Finally, from a focus perspective, fraud and waste aren’t going to get the $2 trillion in savings that Musk promised. Trump will need to eliminate entire departments and rein in entitlement spending. That requires Congress to act and I have no confidence whatsoever that politicians will make cuts that harm their reelection chances.
DOGE is entertaining, but ultimately it won’t be effective.
Sorrry man I SUCK at programing and picked up Cobol. I TRULY DEEPLY SUCK at programming and I can follow it. These kids know 7 different programming languages and can be fluent in something as simple as COBOL on a weekend. It.. not that fucking hard. so yea t hey are LIKELY FLUENT in it. Fortran and Cobol are basic programing languages that are EXTREMELY well-documented. and have been for 40 years. and its what MOST Of the big government agencies run on.
COBOL was intended for management types to be able to write their own software, so the syntax isn’t that complicated. The idea that programmers with even a little experience can’t learn it quickly is a joke.
But they don’t need to know it. They just need to know any language that runs on the system they’re investigating.
They can certainly pick up COBOL in a week. They can’t grok tens of millions of lines of it in that time. These systems are big and (unnecessarily) complex.
That’s one of many reasons why they’re using AI engines to perform pattern recognition, to look for telltales in the data. They can find telltales in the code by similar methods.
AI is nothing like human intelligence and it’s a heinous lie to promote it as such. What it is, for this particular application, is a bookkeeping wonk with several terabytes of short-term memory, which never gets tired. It only notices the kind of patterns you train it to notice, but it catches them all.
Stuff like sorting the SSA payments by birth year of recipient,and tallying how many in X year groups, is dead easy. The scope of the data is the time-consuming part, which is why it is good that DOGE have fast computers.
They don’t generally need to be able to understand the code. AT ALL. They only need to be able to access the data. And a bunch of these wunderkind are probably writing their own queries to do that.
First, as Karry said, no accountant needed for this.
Second, wunderkind don’t need to be spun up on the software when they can just read data directly from the back end database that stores the raw numbers. Which i guarantee isn’t encrypted like it’s supposed to be.
For info, i did many cybersecurity audits on army bases. I work in the Defense Health Agency’s systems daily. I never had to spin up on anything because i’ve been doing this crap for years, and the younger auditors have been dicking around in computer systems for probably half their lives and know how it all works. There are standards and design methodologies that have been tested and refined over decades and *all* systems tend to follow them.
The data matters but so do the processes that create and interpret that data. These systems are just a giant version of Quickbooks. They’ve grown over decades with implementations from the lowest bidder, managed by people who know they can’t be fired and who also know they couldn’t survive in the real world.
There are literally millions of lines of code, hundreds or thousands of systems integrated with each other, and no one person understands the whole thing. Even worse, a lot of these systems have had rewrites attempted, some multiple times, and when those failed they didn’t roll back, they just kept the new and old patched together. The complexity is astonishing.
The idea that some hotshot software developer is going to come in and figure it out in a week is laughable. They won’t even be able to create a data flow diagram in that time.
DOGE will make a lot of noise and probably identify some low hanging fruit that could just as easily have been found with publicly available data. What they won’t do is save two trillion dollars with this approach.
Those sacred ‘processes’ are part of the problem, dumbass. You don’t fix a problem by following the same processes that caused it.
Musk has brought in experts at data analysis. They have their own methods, which don’t depend on those ‘legacy’ systems. They have already found massive fraud and corruption, and it doesn’t matter what you believe, or can understand.
———————————
Concentrating money and authority into a few hands leads inevitably to corruption, abuse, injustice and tyranny.
The processes must be understood to understand the data. DOGE will accomplish nothing but pandering to Trump’s base with this shotgun approach.
Clearly, you don’t know jack shit about computers. To you, they are magic boxes. You should take the trouble to actually learn something before waving your ignorance in the faces of people who have been designing and programming computers for 40 years. I was programming computers before the IBM PC existed. Almost certainly before you became a burden on this world. You should spend 4 or 5 years in diligent study and maybe then you won’t be so full of shit.
so do the processes that create and interpret that data
No, they do not matter for the purposes to which DOGE is putting the data. Computer programs 1) present data (and they don’t need the original system for that), 2) manipulate the data and transform it (which they do NOT want), 3) organize the input of the data (which they don’t care about), or 4) make decisions (including control systems) based on input (and they’re not looking at those systems for these things).
They might need to know the data structure. And they have “local” techies to help them with that. And the business rules that create that data structure can be helpful – but it looks like they’ve got people who grasp that. (Heck it’s one of their complaints about the Treasury auditing: there’s no “reason for expenditure” info on ANY of the lines of money.)
Back around 1998 there was software called (IIRC) Crystal Reports. With that one could open up a large variety of database file formats. It would parse the data and present it in a human readable form.
Then the user could setup filters to find data that matched the filter specifications.
Taking the whole database of active Social Security accounts and sorting it by age of recipients would be dead easy. The longest part would be churning through a few hundred million records.
I worked at a student loan processing company and we did this kind of processing on a database of several million dollars worth of loans – using MS-DOS batch files ported from COBOL. Ran them under Windows 95a on PCs with 120Mhz Pentiums or slower.
I’d taken a class on Excel 97 and at the time figured that with a bit of study on the processes could have replaced the batch files with some Excel spreadsheets. But we had to stick with software that had government approval.
There were reports that had to be sent to three different government agencies. One went by e-mail. One could only be submitted by logging into a Compuserv account (color me surprised anyone still used that in 1998). The third could only accept the report on a physical 1.44M floppy disk.
In the late 80s a marketing firm I worked at went to computers. They hired a programmer. It took three weeks to run a monthly report. The company president who knew me well (ok he was my uncle) asked me to look over the software. I taught myself Unix, looked at the inputs and out puts, then took a look at the code the guy wrote.
It was a mess, deliberately so a d not annotated.
I told them I could write a better rprogram from scratch. They put me in another building gave me a machine and I wrote a program in a week hat ran the monthly report in one week.
Within a month (I had other jobs too small comoany), I could run thr report in12 hours (this machine was less powerful than the comouter in your roku). Along with new data entry screens and programs and other lessor report writing software in six months I had a system running that our one clerk who was hired for her looks could notuck up. I even wrote a precurser to excel or lotus that allowed the user to set up new data entry screens or queries without being able to do more than read and understand basic english.
I couls have made millions. But was ignorant.
Oh, that guy got fired as soon as my program could run the replrt in less than a week.
He left crap in the OS. Eventually I asciied the data onto tape files, ran a complete srub eloaded from the original os disks, ixed all the bus reload all the programs and data…and the report ran in under 6 hours.
Once they decide what they are keeping they will buy new machine, airgap the raw data and write new programs. It should work for about 1 admin cycle.
DataRepublican (small r) suggests otherwise.
GHASP!!!
so elon musk used SOFTWARE ENGINEERS to look for potential fraud in . . . a COMPUTER DATABASE!!!!
say it aint soooooo!!!!!
how could he make such a beginner mistake!? its obvious that if you want to look for potential fraud in a COMPUTER DATABASE you would use . . .
um what would you use? I ran out of steam mid outrage. was there some profession OTHER than a software engineer that you use to look at a database to look for fraud?
I’d use software engineers with an accounting background or accountants supported by software engineers. You need both skillsets to be effective.
only if you are digging for sophisticated fraud.
The sort of stuff they are finding either doesn’t require an accounting background to spot, or an accounting background won’t help (because to an accountant, $50m for condoms in Gaza (even if it’s a different Gaza than the one that’s in the news so much) is not a red flag, just a tag that they don’t care about)
I’ve worked on these large, aging systems and even replaced a couple. There is no way that the 30 person DOGE team will be able to understand it in a year, let alone a couple of weeks.
Let’s up level this. The national deficits over the past few years were:
2019: $984 billion
2020: $3.1 trillion (more than triple the previous year, and under Trump)
2021: $2.8 trillion
2022: $1.4 trillion
2023: $1.7 trillion
2024: $1.8 trillion
I predict that, despite anything DOGE does, the deficit for 2025 will be at least $1.8 trillion. That is, Trump will do nothing to actually reduce the deficit.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’ll bet you $100 to be paid to a charity of the winner’s choice that I’m right. Are you in?
Well, even though DOGE has spotted at least 7 trillion dollars of fraud so far, all that is useless by your account.
So you should give me access to your bank account and let me take whatever I want, for a charity that I make up, because that shouldn’t matter, either, especially since the government has already been stealing your tax dollars for your entire working life.
If you are going to blackpill, do it all the way.
But you aren’t that blackpilled, so you should try enjoying things instead.
Hey, Mike, it’s been awhile!
Check their pronouns…
they aren’t reading the source code … they are looking at the data … completely different project … now I’m sure there isn’t a good data definition of the databases (maybe there is, we would be lucky) … spotting something as simple as a cost code field being left blank doesn’t require ANY background in banking, just some common sense …
we are in the first inning of this whole DOGE game … seems premature to be calling the game already … “DOGE is entertaining, but ultimately it won’t be effective.” …
If they’re using an actual database product (like Oracle), the database contains its own schema definition. It has to, in order to function at all. It will spit it out when given the correct command. With the schema known, queries can be produced that will get whatever you want out of the database. Anyone with a background in “big data”, including an AI, will have what they need at that point to dig out anomalous data. Anomalous would have to be defined, of course, and that’s the real trick.
Have you ever worked on a large system that’s grown over decades? There isn’t one database, there are thousands of different data stores, each with it’s own schema (not all of them relational) and interactions with each other. Looking at the data is marginally easier than parsing all the code, but it is far from trivial. A couple of weeks is not remotely long enough to be effective even with AI tools.
I’ll make you the same offer I did to David Lang (above). The national deficits over the past few years were:
2019: $984 billion
2020: $3.1 trillion (more than triple the previous year, and under Trump)
2021: $2.8 trillion
2022: $1.4 trillion
2023: $1.7 trillion
2024: $1.8 trillion
I predict that, despite anything DOGE does, the deficit for 2025 will be at least $1.8 trillion. That is, Trump will do nothing to actually reduce the deficit.
I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’ll bet you $100 to be paid to a charity of the winner’s choice that I’m right. Are you in?
Have you ever worked on a large system that’s grown over decades?
Yes, actually.
Not taking your bet because I’m assuming the same thing.
If they actually cut the budget, I will be ecstatic. But I’m not holding my breath.
I’m a computer retard but I can get a Crystal Report .xml spit out of a program created 30 years ago and scabbed along the way after following a 3-page pdf document.
I even get it to spit out shapefiles.
Even a caveman like me knows the first quarter of FY25 was loaded like a forklift trying to pick up a castle, frontloaded like money was becoming worthless so send it ALL out the door before January 20th.
You sound like Jazz Hands Walz explaining how the $17B surplus in FY23 turns into a $5B deficit in FY28 without mentioning all the perpetual programs “for the children” that have been created under his careful watch and there’s no fraud under his watch either.
Get yourself a copy of “How to Scam People” from your nearest Nigerian internet bookdealer with that $100.
You mean the fiscal year that Trump has zero influence over will still be spending like Biden’s puppet masters wrote it?
What DOGE is doing at this point isn’t so much actually finding all the waste. It’s like when you’re playing a video game and you have to kill all the minions protecting the boss so that you can then focus on the big guy without dying from a million little arrows. This isn’t going to happen overnight. It won’t even really happen in this administration.
But Elon gets what’s happening. And he’s playing the long game.
So, this is the highest likelihood of Federal cuts in *decades*, and we should just stop, because we won’t reach Nirvana immediately? Seriously? I’m coming to grips with exactly *how insane* many libertarians are, but, REALLY?!
I don’t think they are reading source code. I think the programmers are using AI systems to go through massive amounts of data. With AI, they can skip a lot of the “match this number with that number” tedium, because the AI can bring more context awareness to bear than other software, so the querying of the data can be much more abstract.
Interesting comment from the Speaker of the House about implementing DOGE recommended changes via a reconciliation bill. Procedurally legit— these are budget issues, with the advantage it doesn’t have to go through cloture in the senate. It can be passed with a simple majority. Which may also explain why DOGE is moving so fast to identify the gross adjustments. They need to be in the budget bill which should be (but rarely is) passed in September 2025 for FY26.
This ability to predict the future — how long have you had it?
Early days. Find some low-hanging fruit, make some headlines, generate some public support for digging deeper and cutting harder, then pressure Congress when you have public support.
It’s like you didn’t read the essay, and haven’t been paying attention for the last three weeks…..
The COBOL line was hilarious. I never worked in COBOL, but I worked in “modernizing” systems that WERE written in COBOL. I saw hundreds of thousands of records from government systems — car registrations from multiple states — and I know the standard was for dates to be stored as digits, not as an offset from some epoch.
We were looking closely at the dates — this was 1993 and people were already thinking about Y2K.
YYYYMMDD, either as EBCIDIC characters or Binary Coded Decimal, two-digits-per-byte, was the standard.
I pretty much gave up on honesty in lots of agencies when my ex, a CPA who’d gotten a job with the HUD office as one of the auditors, came in one day with an odd look on her face. There were notices all over the offices that day saying “Just because you work for the .gov does NOT mean you don’t have to file your taxes!”
The guy training her laughed and said “I haven’t filed taxes in X years.” And over the next few days a bunch of people in that office said about the same.
If you don’t have enough assets to offset the cost of prosecution is any IRS agent going to try to sell your case to their boss? When was the last time you heard the IRS prosecute someone poor?
“When was the last time you heard the IRS prosecute someone poor?”
CBS News, 03/09/22: IRS audits the poor at 5 times the rate of everyone else, analysis finds
And they do this because poor people generally don’t have access to good legal teams.
Yep. Back in the late 1990’s when Congress was having hearings about IRS abuse of citizens, it came out that the IRS was extorting the poor. They’d literally make stuff up: “Well, our audit of your taxes from 3 years ago shows that you owed $10,000 more than you paid, and with interest and penalties, you now owe $15,000. But if you give us $1,500 we’ll consider you paid in full.” The “amount owed” was complete BS. In some case it was shown that the amount the IRS claimed they owed was more than they’d actually earned. The victims of these schemes would talk to a tax attorney who would tell them that they could beat the claim, but it would take years, cost about $5,000, and their bank accounts would be frozen and their wages garnished for the entire duration. So people would pay.
Tax disputes always start in IRS “courts”, where 95% of the time the taxpayer loses. You have to exhaust your options in the IRS courts before you can take the case to actual federal courts, where 95% of the time the taxpayer wins.
To my mind, the solution is simple: if a taxpayer wins in federal court, the IRS agents involved, including the “judge” should be terminated for violating a citizens rights, and make them personally responsible for paying the citizen’s legal fees. Make them terrified they’ll pay a price for overstepping, and they’ll stop overstepping.
Yup, poor people get audited a lot. And they get assigned the stupidest and meanest IRS people.
A guy named Flavius Claudius Julianus was sent to govern Gaul in 355. He was ordered to increase tax revenue, or else — at a time when the relatives of Constantine (and he was one) were killing each other with great abandon.
He found the tax collectors were taking bribes from the rich to skip over them, then making up the loss taxes by extorting the poor. The tax rates were so high the masses were close to a rebellion.
So Julianus executed a few tax collectors for taking bribes, fined some rich people for bribing, cut tax rates, and brought in more revenue.
The more things change…
When have I heard of the IRS prosecuting poor people? Constantly. Literally all the time.
If you don’t have enough assets to offset the cost of prosecution
Why would that matter in the least to the US government? They don’t have to justify their expenditures, they budget for them. They require no ROI for anything they spend at the IRS.
They prosecute the poor (as others have noted) because they can cause the least trouble and are most likely to not have lawyers that can make your work life heck. Auditing Musk, OTOH, is much more likely to find your ChatGPT-generated brief to the administrative law judge to be a crock of digitally hallucinated carp and get you smacked down by your boss.
Yeah, I can’t believe people don’t know this.
Auditing the taxes of people who can afford lawyers and CPAs is hard work. Auditing the taxes of regular working stiffs who used TurboTax you can just bully them.
Where the hell does “enough assets to offset the cost of prosecution” even come into this? That’s not how any of this works.
So they don’t have to go to court and seize all your stuff. They just attach liens on it all and can garnish your wages. I knew a collector from the IRS, and from what he said they really have near infinite ability to cripple you without having to go through any prosecutions to start all that.
“but even if we fire Y% government employees” that’s only X% of the budget and there’s still all this other stuff.”
The NPCs have been using this a lot lately.
“Oh, it’s a tiny percentage of the budget. ”
“Oh, it’s only one apartment complex. No big deal.”
“Oh, the fraud is a tiny amount.”
I don’t fucking care. The only acceptable number for fraud of any kind is Zero. I want things to be so thoroughly looked over that in five years, the next generation of auditors only find about twenty dollars unaccounted for and they let the manager pay it.
just like voter fraud which they claim “Is too small to change elections” … if you never look for it OF COURSE its always a “small” number …
sending money to Hellholeistan isn’t necessasrily “fraud” but it sure is NONSENSE … and we should eliminate nonsense as well as fraud … but up until now we were unaware of how much was spent on nonsense … my bet is when nonsense and outright fraud is added together it reaches a pretty big number …
38 billion from USAID may seem like peanuts but it seems to have been the funding engine for ALOT of nonsense … much of it anti-American … turns out fighting the left might start with defunding the left …
If election fraud really is ‘too little to affect the outcome’ — WHAT’S THE FUCKING POINT?!! Why commit fraud to no purpose? But no, election fraud IS big enough to change the results, which is why the Democrats are so desperate to deny it.
Fraud usually starts small, but it never stays small. The fraudsters are practically compelled to get away with ‘just a little bit more’ until $thousands become $millions become $billions become $trillions. Which is where we are now. Fraud, graft and embezzlement have become a lifestyle for the political class. Now they’re squealing because their pet scams are being threatened.
I say, go for it Elon! Shine that bright light into all those dark corners and watch the roaches scatter!
———————————
Candidate Joe Biden, August 2020: “We have assembled the most extensive, comprehensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.”
Minutes later: “What do you mean, I wasn’t supposed to say that?”
I recall Florida being purple, trending blue, and the squishes of the GOPe screaming that if we didn’t abandon all culture wars, we would never win it again.
Then Florida cleaned up their elections and was suddenly R+20.
Now, it’s unlikely that the entire difference was vote fraud, but…
I suspect the Florida graveyards were almost as full of Democrat voters as the ones in Illinois.
———————————
Grandpa voted Republican until the day he died — but he’s been voting Democrat ever since.
Democrats lie, steal, slander and cheat. Relentlessly for two centuries.
They commit vote fraud in every way they possibly can in every election. They see it as their moral duty in the fight against evil. They teach it. They celebrate it. They organize it.
Every citizen should read Caro’s third volume on LBJ and how he stole his senate seat in 1948. It will forever cure the stupid bullshit about election fraud being rare or insignificant. They stole JFK’s election in 1960. They nearly stole 2000. They blatantly stole 2020.
They’d pull off the Battle of Athens or Boss Crump or Mayor Daley level of fraud every election if the second amendment didn’t give them pause.
In 75% of elections where the difference in the vote totals between the R and D candidates is less than 2%, the D wins. This is a fraud signal. Ds win these because when you’re committing fraud, once you’ve produce enough fake ballots to “win”, you stop producing fake ballots.
The D’s always commit fraud. During the Reagan administration, fraud was alleged in Illinois. For the only time in history, state-wide election results were examined (by the then-reasonably-reliable FBI). They found 100,000 fraudulent ballots in Chicago alone. They found that D polling personnel had been taught to commit fraud on behalf of D candidates by their predecessors, going back 4 generations (they couldn’t check back 5 generations, those people were dead from old age). They indicted 63 people, and convicted 61 (1 died before trial, 1 was found unfit to stand trial).
I would bet that nobody alive today has ever seen an honest vote total for a D in a contested election where the poll workers are Ds.
(they couldn’t check back 5 generations, those people were dead from old age)
But they were still voting, I’m sure.
Yes. Read Chicago Mag Jan 2012 about how Democrats partner with criminal gangs for elections.
In Philly in 2020, five different Dem election judges were named in federal indictments for bribes and election fraud.
Remember the story of college kids in Milwaukee riding a bus from precinct to precinct and voting over and over all day. Big party. Big fun. Couple of decades back.
Dave Ramsey teaches financial discipline. After teaching for umpteen years, his advice moved from “pay off the highest interest debts first” to “pay off the smallest debts first”. His reason? By paying off the smallest debts first, you had made visible progress and it helped boost your willpower to go after the larger debts.
I suspect Trump and Musk are doing something similar. By going after the smaller, easier to find problems first, Trump and Musk establish a pattern and increase their credibility, giving themselves the additional political capital to go after larger targets.
Added to that, your average tax payer isn’t interested in hearing about cuts to Medicare or the defense budget until we stop waste and abuse. GOPe has cried about cutting the budget for decades saying, “If we don’t deal with entitlements, it’s not going to matter.” But who the hell is going to stomach a painful cut first when they haven’t trimmed the fat of fraud and subsidizing the Taliban?
It’s a an infrastructure strike. USAID funds a lot of the political nonprofits that make up the bulk of leftist infrastructure. Get rid of those, and the rest becomes easier
It’s the same “logic” that led to “Oh, but only a handful of apartment complexes have been taken over by Venezuelan gangs!” “Do you even hear yourself?!”
Everybody from the financial services industries knows the real definition of an auditor,
Auditor: Someone who wanders the battlefield after the fights over shooting the wounded.
Bonus
Extroverted Actuary: Someone who stares at YOUR shoes while talking.
Coming from a government contractor infosec background in a previous life I’ve noticed this one here gets a lot of airplay too in the wailing category:
“ZOMG, NONE OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VETTED OR EVEN INVESTIGATED!”
Leaving aside the fact that you have a better chance of seeing Bigfoot than the above being remotely true, everyone still has weird ideas about what background investigations are. They run your prints and they run your name through the various government databases and maybe interview you or people around you. That’s pretty much it. There’s not some secret mind ray out there they use on you because you’re in some sort of classified system. Even being read into a classified program can be an exercise in boredom. You can get your driver’s license renewed in less time than it takes being read into some of this stuff.
And all of that above is aside from the fact that some of the most absolute walking garbage people in the world have high level clearances.
It is absolutely insane how the idiots shrieking into the void about Musk have convinced themselves that the grift can continue. It’s coming to an end one way or the other. Either Musk and Trump succeed, or the whole house of cards, not just the US portion, but the whole damn thing, is going to collapse. The United States economy is still the engine driving the world. Europe has stifled their own economic growth in favor of unsustainable levels of social spending and regulation.
None of the EU nations could defend themselves against an aggressor without the U.S. at this point, and their carbon policies have set them up for catastrophe energy production wise. China’s economy is smoke and mirrors, and both the smoke and the mirrors are paid for with the money earned from selling the U.S. cheap goods.
Yet somehow the usual suspects think if they can just stop Trump and Musk, they can go on looting the wealth produced by a century plus of economic freedom, while simultaneously smothering that freedom. Most of them are just economic illiterates, but some are not. They are just so committed to their evil games that they are willing to collapse the only thing keeping the savages at bay.
There are those who are willing to help the world burn, as long as they believe they will wind up on the top of the ash heap.
One I’ve seen today is regarding the millions of “extra” Social Security Numbers. Those aren’t fraud! Or if it is fraud, it’s “fraud” because the fake numbers belong to “undocumented migrants,” who had to get fake SSNs to work and are actually paying *into* Social Security. So if you clean those out the system will collapse because we will lose the money these hardworking undocumented migrants are generously contributing to the system.
I kid you not, there are people on my TwitX feed saying this.
Well said! And yes, the left/loonies are throwing anything the can at the wall, hoping something sticks. The other thing is this is also basically a zero based budget review, which, as far as I know, has never been completed.
The “NOBODY ELECTED MUSK and he has access to our personal information!!!” bunch needs to hosed down with septic tank drainage.
Guess what, morons? “NO ONE ELECTED THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CIVIL SERVANTS in SSA, IRS, CMS, and all the other agencies” that routinely have access to your data without you even knowing, either. Bureaucrats aren’t any more elected than Musk, yet the idiots somehow think they are somehow more trustworthy.
That’s before factoring in government contractors like GDIT, Maximus, Conduent, and a hundred other companies that process government (state and federal) documents both paper and digital, handle phone calls from individuals, etc.
Hell, when I was working for a company that got later got bought by one of them, getting paid barely above minimum wage in 2001-2003, I had dozens of worker’s comp policies going through my hands every day, and a lot of the non-corporations (like sole proprietorships) had SSNs for their ID numbers instead of FEINs, company/individual financial info, and stuff easily found even in the internet 25 years ago. I saw policies from everything from Disney’s policy (FOR ALL their divisions at the time) for 45 states & DC (shipped in 2 10-ream paper boxes!), to policies for things as varied as musicians (Korn to Michael W. Smith, to name a few. Another musician had a different LLC & FEIN set up for EACH ALBUM they ever did, with an employee or two for each) to mom & pop businesses ran out of a garage.
All while working for a company that had trouble hiring people because 80% of applicants disqualified themselves from criminal records or drug use, and it wasn’t uncommon for coworkers that came in via temp employment agencies to be discovered to have been such security risks when it came time to transition them to permanent hires, and the temp companies (plural) having lied about their status.
The guys next door in the same building on the company campus were processing the 3-4 year backlog of Green Card approvals that had built up when Clinton gave the contract to a bunch of fraudsters on a Reservation (that would take a year to process 1-3 months worth), which led to our company getting the contract under W, and accidentally sending out the visa renewal approval letter (that should have been mailed in 2000 or early 2001) to one of the 9/11 hijackers – in MARCH 2002.
And, Over a decade prior, as a temp, I was classifying documents for the Ivan Boesky case for the same company when news came in of the Earthquake that interrupted the World Series in 1989 – and there were papers coming through that had personal and corporate BANK ACCOUNT numbers, stock trades, etc.
People really are clueless about just WHO actually sees information. And, I guarantee 99.999% of the people seeing that info have never been elected to anything, even in school.
A lot of government agencies have been moving to the cloud. So, folks at Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc. also have access to your data.
Yes, because none of this critical data is encrypted by the company before being committed to Cloud storage (and replicated across international networks). Why would it be? Regulators are perfectly happy with that situation, I’m sure.
Sir: be advised that Savannah River Site, the Federal contractor in SC processing nuclear waste and storing some Significant Nuclear Material, decided in 2021 to move ALL email to Microsoft Exchange from a locally-controlled system. In fact, if MS has a communications error, NO mail at the Site goes through.
All the historical emails went to Exchange, too. It was hacked in 2022. Taxpayers pay a FORTUNE for programmers to plug all the holes in Windows, too; each user has to run a checksum program to approve opening any app on a desktop. Huge hit on performance.
the idiots somehow think they are somehow more trustworthy
Because they’re “professionals” and we must trust the “experts”.
Elon Musk doesn’t qualify as a “professional” because he’s not adequately credentialed (by their measure).
It was largely “credentialed” experts who got us *into* this mess.
This exactly. The house is being cleaned. Yeah, some good and useful stuff is just going to be thrown out. But it’s a hoarder house.
This exactly. The house is being cleaned. Yeah, some good and useful stuff is just going to be thrown out. But it’s a hoarder house. Shit has got to go
What about Dana Nessel’s(and other A’s G) lawsuit? That line of criticism, call it the “bad precedent” argument is one I have no clue about. More stalling or legitimately a hole in the law that needs addressed before it is misused?
To be clear I’m not on board with the idea that power was usurped or the appointment was illegal. It’s obvious to me…a guy who grew up poor AF for my formative years, that cutting spending isn’t fun….its more like a necessary amputation. What I don’t know is if there’s a chance for abuse in the future or not. Does the way Trump went about this, necessary as it may have been to avoid the classic bureaucratic foot dragging, present an avenue to subverting good governmental structure or is that more of the same stalling dressed up as legitimate fear?
I’ve been a Systems Engineer for about 20 years now. We go through at least 3 audits a year, sometime more. We have the regular audit that comes from being a health care company, the audit that comes with accepting credit cards, and 2 or more IT audits. There’s the security audit, the licensing audit, & every other year the Microsoft True-Up audit.
The auditing companies (which change every year or two, depending on whether it’s a financial or IT audits) involves letting them (the auditors) run specialized software that basically crawls our systems; for every server it notes installed applications, OS, version, security rev, etc. Does the same for all well-known (I.e. COTS -Commercial Off The Shelf) software. They have Dev teams that review the code for any of our home-grown software. For applications & services that I wrote, that means I turn over a copy of all my audited code to a Dev Auditor who runs it through software that checks for known security vulnerabilities or poor programming practices.
The systems audits make not of every share on the machine & note all users who have permission to the share, as well as all of us admins who have Armin access to the machine. Again- automated software does all the heavy lifting.
Another audit goes through all my communication logs, I.e. SFTP, the security logs for the domain controllers, etc. because these run into the hundreds of thousands of pages what they do is have the apps generate random page numbers as well as random time periods- then make us go through every entry in the selected ranges & justify them.
Any users who accessed the system during selected ranges, or any who have assigned access to shares, have to be justified. Anything that generates a flag on any of the audited periods/shares/etc. requires a “management reply”, I.e. they get divided amongst all the engineers and we have to explain why these people had access to the share. This doesn’t just mean that their job description matches the share’s contents, but it also means I have to find the ticket in our service software where the user was authorized to access the share by the user’s manager, and where appropriate by the manager of the data. That means the head of Legal has to have signed off on letting Lawyer Doe have access to certain folder.
In looking at this I realized I haven’t even scratched the surface. Audits take anywhere from a few weeks to months. But the thing that ties all of this together is that the audits are completely impossible w/o the heavy use of specialized software. And in order to make sure I can pass my audits I write a fair amount of software whose sole purpose is to review logs daily and email me if any flags are found. Since the nature and character of flagged actions changes constantly I revisit all of this software monthly, writing new flags or deprecating old checks.
I have never seen or have any knowledge of what the financial audits look like. If we hire Deloitte or similar to come in, the CPAs, Accounting, Finance & Legal all handle that stuff. Since accounting principles are uniform the money stuff is the easiest, quickest, & smallest part of any audit.
Anyone who pretends to be worried about non-CPAs being involved in the 90% of an audit that has nothing to do with finance is telegraphing to the world that they have absolutely no idea of what auditing is, what it’s for, or how it’s done. You can freely mock them and if I may pass along a suggestion- mock them mercilessly and hard. Call them names, question their intelligence & their manhood. And if it’s a chick, ask her if her husband is embarrassed that her mustache is bigger than his.
I worker for The 2010census. My job. Was auditing the work product of the field worker, for that , we had access to a really extensive database that listed the occupancy history of just about every property in The region going back for decades. It was a commercially available product that had the contract with th Commerce Dept. We were NOT supposed to ho schlepping around just snooping at ahatever. Getting caught was a fire able offense, with a,permanent bar from further government employment. As a,strange aside,my area covered the ILOH’ s former home town of El Nido, CA. My w auditing caught several field guys who were turning in completely bogus work. They got canned.
If I understand correctly,, a number of these agencies have been audited/investigated — many on multiple occasions — by OIGs and other authorized staff, and in many cases significant, if not massive, fraud, waste and abuse was found… it’s just that nothing was ever done. No followup, no remediation, no cleaning out — those reports were certainly valid, just pointless given the political morass and the swindlers who ran it. The people who run Treasury, etc are clearly aware of these past investigations and have obviously supplied them to DOGE to help shortcut the ongoing damage control.
If I understand correctly,, a number of these agencies have been audited/investigated — many on multiple occasions — by OIGs and other authorized staff, and in many cases significant, if not massive, fraud, waste and abuse was found… it’s just that nothing was ever done. No followup, no remediation, no cleaning out — those reports were certainly valid, just pointless given the political morass and the swindlers who ran it. The people who run Treasury, etc are clearly aware of these past investigations and have obviously supplied them to DOGE to help shortcut the ongoing damage control.
I worked for 35 years as an IT consultant to various Big 8/6/4 audit firms and ended it leading a data science team that created M/L algorithms that earned a metric shit ton (the technical term) of money for my employer.
The bane of mine existence has always been data quality. Crap entered incorrectly, or corrupted by bugs, or so old no one knows what it means any more. That’s the COBOL connection. That stuff’s so ancient it has mods on top of mods made by people who too often didn’t really understand what the code they were changing did or was supposed to do. The guys who might have known are either dead or long retired like me.
That confusion goes triple for guys like me who waltzed in and had to make sense of it all in a few hectic days. Lots of initially suspicious looking stuff turns out to be incompetence rather than conspiracy.
That’s what I suspect about most of what DOGE is finding in the Social Security systems. Don’t get me wrong. The systems seem so loosy-goosy I’d be astonished if there weren’t massive fraud, but plain old government incompetence probably explains a lot.
That said, paying out billions you shouldn’t because your software sucks can be worse than what crooks can siphon off. There’s a limit to the crooks’ imagination. Bad systems have infinite possibilities.
You may be able to write cogently about audits. I don’t know. You bored me early on with your flood of gratuitous profanity. Learn to write so you aren’t insulting intelligent people with your diction every other sentence.
“LURN 2 WRITE MORE GUD!” declared the random nobody in the comments of a blog post he only saw because it went viral, to the guy who has sold millions of books. 😀
Let me guess you looked up the word cogently so you could sound smart not realizing that your post itself makes you look like a self righteous smarmy moron.
Or…. you could fuck ALL the way off.
Would you prefer that I avoid using profanity by cordially inviting you to autofornicate?
Hey ILOH,
Funny that, if it had been Obama or Biden that started this DOGE (Yeah I know that Obama started the precursor) and started finding all this fraud, waste and abuse, the same people clutching pearls and screaming would be ecstatic and saying”Yes Our guy is doing good work”, but because it is *Hated Orange man bad* they are up at arms instead. I personally want to see a huge chunk of .gov laid off for redundancy. The same people whose jobs were secure while we were getting laid off and looking for jobs during the banking in 2006-2008 and during the Covid where they were screaming “Stay at home, stop the spread” and lecturing us and being all sanctimonious while they were collecting full pay and benefits where the average Americans were getting furloughed, I ain’t feeling a lot of pity right now. Am I mean, perhaps, now they get a taste how those 14,000 pipeline workers felt on day 1 of Bidens administration when he killed the pipeline with a stroke of the pin, and none of them made the news except of some snarky comments about “maybe they should learn to code”. Now it’s on the other foot and they are screaming about some poor bureaucrats getting the axe. Funny where their priorities lie. A huge chunk of their”dark money funding” for their far left NGO’s comes through the USAISD, and that is in trouble, and I also blame the establishment GOP, they are complicit, the squishies, no spine and are afraid to stand up, and wanted their chunk of the plunder and they had a gentlemens agreement, now it is all in danger, hence the outrage. President Trump has 2 years to make things happen because if the donks get the house, he will be fending off impeachment after impeachment through the rest of his term.
I am a career Internal Auditor focusing on Technology and found this article simply outstanding. Also, nearly 30 years in Army Finance, so I do know a bit about government accounting, such as it is.
Musk and Team are doing exactly what I would do on a short timeline assessment to determine ‘big rocks’ gaps. Look at the data to identify problem areas. Data integrity (what we used to call pregnant man’ tests of data show where data errors exist (200 year old Social Security Accounts come to mind). That then leads to understanding where to look for process and management failures.
Trying to understand how things work by simply interviewing folks is a fools game. Get into the data and LOOK. It will be there. (and file formats really to not matter) Not unlike dealing with teenage kids.
How dare you even question whether man can be pregnant? /s
My personal favorite is part of the COBOL clownery and it goes like this.
“The whole thing with 1.5 million 150-somethings in the Social Security system is deliberately taken out of context by Ebil DOGE because the system automatically inserts an 1875 DOB into any DOB field that’s empty.”
ffs, that makes this worse, not better!
Age is one of the primary eligibility factors for SS. There should not be ANY records being input with blank DOBs. If crappy birth recordkeeping means it’s not precisely known, take a goddamn guess.
Also, how hard would it be to set the system to every day generate a report of people who just turned, say, 100, for a human to go make sure they’re actually still alive? We could send them birthday cards! I’d even chip in for that!
Inserting an 1875 DoB for any blank DoB field is down to piss-poor specification, coding and testing by incompetent semi-trained simians. no more, no less.
In other words, recent college graduates. 😛
In 1935, when SS was started an 1875 default date probably made sense. It appears that it hasn’t been changed since.
There is no default date and never was. In 1935, there were no computers. The SSA didn’t computerize until the 1960s.
There is one default date for virtually every moderately complicated modern computer: midnight UTC on 1 January 1970 (most computers interpret their time setting as seconds past that),
Absolutely no reason for a birthdate database to be taking or storing times in a format that’s down to the second, will have plenty of examples that can’t be stored in that format, or for it to somehow go to a hundred years before that.
Federal audits, in my experience, are useless.
I do monthly reporting for a particular DOD agency. And to give you an idea how seriously DOD agencies take reporting, in 2018 they fired my team’s two contractors leaving two utterly incompetent and untrained accountants (I was one of them) to try to do monthly reporting.
I had never seen nor touched the interface process between the accounting system and reporting systems, but I found myself expected to make it happen in November 2018 when the nor experienced useless accountant called in sick.
I was told the results of our incompetence were that we made DFAS’ reporting so late that it made national news reports.
Things HAVE improved, and we’re regularly on time now.
But for all the panic about auditor meetings, I have never heard a good, insightful question from an auditor. Nor do I sense the slightest bit of competence from them in understanding ANYTHING but “process improvements”. They add rubber stamp steps that claim to improve things by just slow us down. But I’ve yet to see them “find” anything except minor clerical errors on documents.
I truly doubt any of them can look at my journal voucher packets and tell me if they’re right or wrong. Or if they were needed or not.
Larry,
I’ve spent most of my career doing finance technology and have at multiple times been a finance control owner. One of my least favorite parts of the job. As a dedicated corporate drone I am actually held to real standards unlike our Federal overlords in DC.
I have had internal auditors crawl up my ass so far that I could feel their fingers tickling the back of my eyeballs over a screwed up approver where a system configuration problem allowed a manager to approve their own access request.
No auditable findings, but anything that looks weird would get you a similar experience from the external auditors.
Considering the hell I have been through and have never even failed an audit it pisses me off to no end what I am hearing about what Musk is finding. I bend over backwards to make sure I never have to talk to the IRS while the government is like “What? Record what this money is being spent on? Nah!”
Let’s talk about the stupid COBOL defense as well. The issue is not COBOL and even if it was a glitch the problem is that the underlying data is either crap or fraudulent. It could be fraudulent crap. It doesn’t matter if you were using COBOL, Python, or whatever. 11 million records of people over age 120 and no one thought that was weird? We sent money to these people! I can’t even begin to express what the IRS would do to me if I had 1000 records like that and tried to blame it on a computer glitch. “We’re just over here using this outdated computer language and oh shucks we accidentally screwed up the dates and have thousands of incorrect records. What are you going to do?” I’m telling you as a decades long finance technology professional this claim is bullshit.
Last but not least, the duplicate SSN’s which is a big deal and people said “Musk doesn’t understand SQL!”
The issue is in a well structured database you can have unique identifiers and it doesn’t have to even be the primary key (what you would use to look up specific records in a specific database table). SSN’s should be unique, full stop. If they are supposed to be how the government tracks us, and that was not their original purpose, then my SSN should be unique to me and only me even if I change my name, address, whatever. No one else should ever have it. The fact that this is possible means the government is failing in its most basic duties to make sure something we are practically required to have is following basic rules of data integrity.
These numbskull NPC’s can try to defend it all they want but from the fintech side I can promise you it is utter bullshit and I’m not a CPA just someone who has had to run and program systems that accountants and bankers have used for decades.
30 year IT professional here. I’ve worked on software in organizations of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 to government contracts. I’ll tell you that as far as code quality goes, big corporations can be really bad, but government software is infinitely worse. You’ve got several things going on in these systems. First, you’ve got grossly obsolete technology. Then you have the developers who give themselves job security by crafting purposely-convoluted systems that only they understand. You also have armies of poorly-managed contractors who make massive changes using minimal documentation (very often none at all). Then you have people who take advantage of all that chaos to commit fraud that’s almost impossible to trace. All of these are things that can plague corporate systems, too, but ultimately the corporation has to make a profit, beat their competition and keep shareholders happy, and those things are very much at risk if any of that becomes too prominent. Government systems don’t have that accountability as long as the budgets keep growing, and they almost always do.
I can’t possibly read all the comments before I post this or I will forget what I was saying, but there’s the one about how Elon is going to intentionally overlook all of his own government contracts like those are some sort of corporate welfare, I just keep telling them they can stop paying the bill for launching satellites if they want to either stop launching satellites or go back to paying Vlad to launch them for us.
Then I ask how long they’ve beenthat pro Russia
Larry, thank you for once again clearly pointing out the stupidity.
Sometime your language can get a little rough, but it’s more than understandable here, as we’re dealing (once again, sadly) with people who just will not listen to reason or heed reality. Since you can’t actually beat them with a stick, harsh language is your only outlet for the frustration.
I need to come back and check for rants more often. Keep it up!
Larry, I was surprised Owen Pitt wasn’t involved. This would be perfect for both of his skill sets. (What’s the PUFF on undead bureaucrats.)
I enjoyed this as much as the ‘HK. Because you suck. And we hate you.’
“…. good necessary wonderful saint of a government employee or super awesome wonderful government program got cut …”
Everybody and every program is just a line item in the budget. In DoD every year there are valid requirements that fall below the cut line. One of the biggest issues in the DoD was– what can I cut to fund the priority programs? Because something is always getting cut, there are always emergent high priority items …. which means identifying the funded stuff to cut to fund those priorities.
DOGE, if it can find the BS items, will be huge help for the green eye shade folks. Giving them the justification they need to re align the funds to the priority bills.
Problem will be congress and their f’g plus-ups to programs. Plus-ups are usually direction to a service to fund something, but the service has to cut from within to fund them. No new money.
BTW- I can’t figure out how the DoD fails audits. In the Pentagon, we had to balance to the penny in creating funding plans/proposals. In the acquisition command we had to report monthly on all funds — what was allocated, what had actually been obligated, what had actually been spent (i.e. invoices received and approved for payment to the contractors). Those reports were monitored all the way up to the Pentagon for tracking purposes.
I mean. They didn’t have to offer the generous resignation package, but they did. (And I, for one, am happily taking it. I’m good at my job, sure, but…well, the gov DOES need to be smaller, and I can go do something else with my life!)
Exactly!
Like I said above, every DOD auditor issue I’ve seen in over 30 years has been about minor details about the accounting process, not bad results in the ledger sheets.
I’ve been closing one agency’s books for 7 years and the only single piece of feedback I’ve ever gotten was when an auditor accidentally / mistakenly emailed me directly to say I used the wrong code categorize my documentation. Nothing about the entries themselves in that documentation.
That’s a “finding”.
It’s like writing a paper discovering how to make Iron Man’s Arc Reactor, and someone complaining there’s a misspelled word on page 37.
“Back to auditing, just because the Social Security database is filled with garbage doesn’t mean that all that garbage is fraud. However, try that excuse when the government audits you. ‘Oh, I’m sorry my books are riddled with errors, it is no big deal, that’s just how we do things around here.’ and see how that shakes out for you.”
I know a longtime FFL who had his license revoked by the BATFags last year over niggling paperwork errors that PALE in comparison to what DOGE has uncovered thus far. He doesn’t have a few hundred thousand dollars to fight it in court, and the BATFag lawyers he’d have to fight are paid by his tax dollars. “Whoops, by bad”, doesn’t cut it when Leviathan is looking at *your* books.
Spot on. And that was a deliberate choice in the last 4 years.
“Except when our government’s books are filled with things like 30 million dollars to fund a Transsexual Peruvian Orchestra, and 99% of that money never made it out of northern Virginia, ”
I’d say unfortunately more of that money went out than only 1%. Part of the reason why the Alphabet mafia, hit the whole world at once so hard. I had always wondered how and why much of Europe and some of Africa was rioting out over Floyd, because we were paying them to.
No probably 10% of that money went to Transexuals in Peru, more the pity. Probably more direct graft in good sounding things like medicine and food sent to anywhere.
Stuff like this is probably why the Middle east hates us. It’s tough to hate someone across the world for sinning (freedom), but if the gov’t are sending funds to Trans kids, promote feminism, marxism and who knows what else in other countries, can’t blame them for hating us.
And most places aren’t gonna give you a quite generous severance package if you opt to leave of your own accord–and they didn’t caveat it either. Worked for the feds for six months? You could still take the offer. Five, ten, twenty years? Same.
Me, I’ve been there 14 years, but only 7 count because I was a contractor for the first 7. (If I’d been able to count those contractor years, I’d stick around, because I’m then only 7 years away from getting my 20 plus the year required to hit the age necessary for it. But since I can’t…)
I’m a good worker, I do my job, I do it well. But I’m also all for shrinking the government, and this is a once in a lifetime offer for someone like me–so I am taking the hell out of that deferred resignation and going to go launch a career in something else 😀
And, frankly, though I get it that everyone always thinks “Oh, it wouldn’t be me, I wouldn’t get laid off!” …we were told. We were told big changes were coming, coming fast, and that particularly for folks still on probation, odds were good that they’d get laid off. And then the offer to leave was laid out–so if they chose not to take it, well…sorry, but you were told…
(That being said, at least in my corner of fedgov, not many folks are getting laid off (though some, esp in management, sorely need to be) because mine is one of the few that actually makes money–and is also heavily involved on the oil and gas drilling front, and is already hellishly understaffed. So I think that any chopping blocks are, at the very least, being delayed a bit until drilling gets back underway and they have a better idea how it’s all going to shake out.)
And in the meantime, hearing the screaming and wailing and gnashing of teeth coming out of DC and HQ? I’m loving every second of it. 😀
Back in the day, my father’s business had an accounts manager who was embezzling. Her son had a severe drug problem, and she thought that she had to steal in order to keep him from being murdered by his dealer. She stole about $50,000.
Her approach involved making the account documentation into an impenetrable maze of errors and omissions, guessing that such things might get her fired eventually, but shouldn’t get her arrested. In addition to direct embezzlement, she also told clients that she could write off their debt to the company for some lesser amount placed in her account. She would then delete the original debt rather than marking it paid off. Overall, her activity cost the company about $350,000.
Ever since then, whenever I hear about some bureaucrat who “oops” failed to maintain proper financial (or election) documentation, I conclude it isn’t an error, but a criminal coverup. When I’ve dug deeper, more often than not, I’ve been right.
(On a related note, the local (Democrat) prosecutor didn’t want to prosecute until my dad raised an unholy stink. “She’s a single mother… Juries won’t want to convict… It was not a violent crime”)
COBOL is the 1911 of programming languages. It may not be the newest, the shiniest or the prettiest but it will get the job done reliably. It can be explained simply to non-experts and it just keeps right on going. Some code I wrote in the id 1980s is still in use at a bank for the reasons above.
The easy part as it turns out, is exposing all the slimey graft and corruption. The hard part will be keeping the scum in government from reverting back to their old tricks, after Trump and Musk are gone.
I hope we can, but Schumer saying “They’re taking away everything we have” says it all. The kleptocrats see our money as their own personal slush fund.
People need to be thinking about that as well
as the immediate, and glorious,housecleaning, going on right now.
How do we keep what Trump and Musk gain?
One NPC Wail I’ve heard lately is that:
-“ELON IS A MONOPOLY!” (No, Elon is just at the head of his fields. Yes, he’s subsidized, but he’s USING those subsidies to create products and innovate.)
and
-“ELON AND TRUMP ARE THE CORRUPTION! THEY’RE TAKING DEMOCRACY FROM THE PEOPLE!” (Which ignores the DNC, Federal Government, and GOP Old Guard corruption being FAR worse than anything Elon and Trump could be).
and
-“They’re taking education access from children by shutting down the Department of Education!” (Test scores and results have fallen EVERY year since that fell beast of an agency was created.)
I’m honestly at the point where just shutting the whole of DC down and arresting 75 to 99.9% of it would get a nigh one hundred percent conviction rate.
As a CPA and former partner at one of the world’s largest accounting firms all I can say to this is: “Well said! Thanks for putting into words what I’ve been saying to folks through gritted teeth.” As usual Larry hit this one out of the park.
Just for the record:
It’s not like a giant tumor being cut off. It’s like a disgusting gangrenous wound. Tumors, you still want to be delicate, to save what’s worth saving. Gangrene and osteomyelitis (that’s when your infection goes to the bone) is a hack and slash time.
The time to be gentle was when you noticed that you had a huge cut on your toe that wasn’t healing. That was the time to get your diabetes under control, to see the doctor, get the wound debrided, and get on some nasty antibiotics that would ruin you for about 6 weeks. Now, you’re not just going to have the toe cut off, but the foot and probably halfway up the leg, if you want to live. Oh, we can cut less, sure, but there’s no promise that any of that is actually viable and uninfected.
Yes, we will probably cut off more than you would like and yes, it’s going to be lifechanging in a way you don’t like.
But you’ll live.
That’s the difference. A tumor is potentially invasive and ugly. This wound is festering and looks a lot better than it actually is. Things are so rotten underneath and it’s spread so far that yeah, we’re gonna cut some of the good to get rid of the bad.
It’s a shame. It is. If we’re lucky, the good guys will still want a job when we’re back toward reconstructing and trying to put it back together. But right now, we’re just trying to make sure it’s viable and not going to outright die at any minute.
Sincerely,
TheRightNurse
I learned Fortran back in the day. I used my accounting degree for contract proposals and scheduling for 45 years in defense. We would teach all sorts of obsolete languages to modify old F-16s. The smart engineers could learn it all quickly. One of the best guys I knew left F-22 communications design to become a trauma surgeon at age 34. I learned a lot from him. I learned from a self taught engineer that with money and looking in the right places you can build any race car product you can imagine. Some young guys with imagination can figure out anything. Hard work is the most important part.
You got a standing ovation in this household where the DOGE-dodger fisk part 1 was read aloud.
Can’t wait for part 2 wherein the esteemed author climbs the turn buckles, rallies the crowd and then turns and delivers a devastating elbow-drop to the leftist-apologist and obstructionist foe.
The bit about the auditors not being CPAs and that’s normal reminds me of how the establishment media continually tried to spin “Joe the Plumber isn’t a licensed plumber”, completely ignoring how plumbing licenses worked in his state and that he’d obviously been arrested long ago if that wasn’t proper, into some big own.
Just the commie left and RINOs desperately trying to cover up all of their criminal activities in the budgets.
They’re called budget cuts because they hurt. If they were pleasant they would be called budget tickles. That is absolute gold Larry, I am going to have to use it.
One lame NPC argument I’m seeing in the news media in my home state of New Mexico is the idea that people who were once working at Federal-level jobs, who recently lost those jobs, cannot even get sympathy from their own relatives over the loss of those jobs.
The people writing those stories want to claim it all started with the people now in power in Washington. But did it? Really? Seems to me like a lot of people lost jobs while the prior administration was routinely kicking out “Male, Pale, and Stale” employees to make room for others. How many reports did the news media make, when those kinds of firing were happening? Not a whole lot. They lost credibility for failing to report truths that the public could figure out for themselves was happening.
Another bad “you lost credibility by lying to us” situation in my home state of New Mexico, involves what the media is calling the “DWI Enterprise” (and other terms) which amounts to dirty cops working within at least three different corrupt New Mexico Law Enforcement tribes or groups or agencies taking bribes to let people who should have been prosecuted for driving drunk, instead escape any punishment or accountability. So far, cops from the police department in Albuquerque got busted. Ditto for the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s organization. And that State’s own police departments. And that’s “so far”. Who knows how much farther the “rot” will spread, if and when investigations keep on looking into how much cancer is in the Body Politic.
Now add to that the body worn camera footage of a member of the State’s Police where that female cop was driving, drunk, and got pulled over; only to resist arrest and try to call her agency’s “Sarge” to try to make her legal problems go away. The cops who arrested her had to break her vehicle’s window to get her out of it. And we’re supposed to trust our cops?!?
And the Legacy News Media wants sympathy for firings?!
One of the most anger-inducing things I’ve seen, when I look at those reports in media, is that the Top Cops in New Mexico are implying or claiming things like, “It’s impossible to know what’s happening, unless citizens report tips to people like the Feds”.
That’s horsecrap.
What’s lacking are not citizen’s reports. It’s honest cops, who are willing to bust the crooks who are wearing badges.
I had nothing to do with reporting any of the DWI Enterprise nonsense, but I did in fact turn in actionable reports on other situations that should have been dealt with many years ago. In some situations, I have been waiting for seven hundred plus full weeks, now, for the Feds to “do anything”. Or the state’s auditors. Or the Attorney General’s office. Or, well, anyone!
The kinds of things I reported should have put dozens of state and county and city level people into prison cells. But … nada. Nothing. Big fat empty nothing.
I hope that Trump disbands entire Federal agencies, due to them not doing a darned thing to help clean up corruption.
What proof do citizens have that no actionable tips were ever reported? And more to the point: how much jail time are crooked Federal cops going to get, for ignoring any such tips?
Personally, if I was able to advise “Elon and Company” (DOGE) about how to go about looking into whether the “effing bunch of idiots” (FBI) is even capable of investigating corrupt police agencies, let alone willing to do so, I would start with “can these morons even read books like See Spot Run” … and go from there. Sit them down in a public library, with children’s books, and see if the so-called investigators can read them!
What I’m seeing, so far, is a lot of people (in the VA, for just one example) retroactively covering their butts, and trying to make excuses for not doing their jobs, prior to this.
I personally have every intention, if I get questioned about my old anti-corruption tips and/or reports, of telling the butt-covering people to come back in seven hundred weeks, and I’ll pencil them into my schedule, to give them answers then.
Or if I know they’re about to be booted out of the jobs they were not doing, anyway, just delay-and-deny for seven weeks. Seems fair to me: that’s still literally a hundred times better than their record of looking into the tips citizens turned in, many years ago.
I find it surprising that the news media does not “understand” why the public is sitting back, with popcorn, watching firings?!