According to D.O.G.E. yesterday:
This is absolutely mind-boggling. Claims for unemployment from people not yet born??? How could even one of those applications have passed initial scrutiny, let alone been paid?
What's worse is that this is just one instance of a government department failing the most basic test of competency and thoroughness in doing its duty. How can we, the taxpayers and voters of America, trust our government in future when we keep getting this drumroll of departments, agencies and individuals who have signally failed in their task and squandered our posterity?
I won't be satisfied until every government employee who should have caught these applications, but didn't, has been fired; and until everyone who made such spurious claims has been charged and convicted of the relevant crimes. It would be nice if the government would also refund taxpayers the amount of tax dollars that have been wasted . . . but I guess that's the definition of a "sunk cost". We won't see that money again.
Peter
22 comments:
Older systems have little to no error checking. I worked with an older system and had to report a 1.3 million sale, enter the same figure in 3 spots. The one spot I made an error, 13 million, was of course the one with the typo. Apparently, management was dancing in the halls until finance caught the error at the end of the quarter, then my name was mud. By the way, no commas, count the zeros and don't miscount. The point is they are using antiquated systems. Let someone loose in such a system with a sense of humor and you get this nonsense. I don't think this explains all of it, but probably some of it. How much is really fraud versus stupid errors?
Not only should every Fed employee that let that money go get fired, but the DOJ should find out who has it and arrest them and have them in jail.
they need to find out who cashed the damn check ! granted we all seen the "staff' at the DMV, so it not that much more to think they just might be the best ones ?
some might be just stupid errors, but where is the MONEY ???
--It would be nice if the government would also refund taxpayers the amount of tax dollars that have been wasted . . . but I guess that's the definition of a "sunk cost". We won't see that money again.--
If you were to see that money again, they would have to tax you first, so they'd have something to pay you back with.
It would be nice for the government to refund our misspent money, but where would they get the money? Right out of our own pockets. ;)
Not asleep. Purposeful bureaucrats following the lead of corrupt politicians.
I will be nobody had the job to audit new claims, their mandate was to approve everything possible.
And, as Xoph observes, new systems are set up in parallel with all the old(er) systems with no data exchange so every system needs manual data entry with no validation. It isn't just the government, big companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise have the same problem of too many disconnected pieces of software that all need data and can't cross-correlate data.
That is what the DOGE guys are doing: extracting the data from all the systems and using modern tools to do the correlation and data validation for the first time.
It's not laziness, nor incompetence.
IT'S FRAUD!
People are supposed to go to jail for what's been done.
Here in Florida I have had no issue with the DMV staff. They do a bang-up job. Of course Florida is not the norm compared to most states.
Wait, step back a moment. There's FEDERAL unemployment. Since when. I've only ever (once) collected state unemployment. When did this scam start?
How does someone get a Social Security Number before they are born? I'd like to see when I'll have grandkids.
The key point is that "stupid errors" never get detected or corrected. The designers and administrators omitted specific procedures in these systems do that, so corrupted data accumulates in these systems.
This presents a goldmine of opportunity for fraud. There are always sharp-eyed criminals who can spot those opportunities and exploit them.
Errors and frauds are always strongly connected.
One would like to believe this is a result of incompetence but in reality it's far more likely to be complicity to widespread fraud.
Precisely, that's what should be done. If someone cashed the check, there is an actual person, with an actual (checking) account. Get the money back first, prosecute the recipient, then fire the employee(s) responsible.
The problem with these stories is that they leave this exact point unresolved, so that the reader is steered to the conclusion that it's all intentional fraud - crime. You can rail about the lazy instant-gratification politics of Democrats until the cows come home, this is the thing that Republicans do that is behaviorally identical - assuming the worst in cases like this. Maybe about 20% of all these clerical mistakes are actual fraud being perpetrated, the rest is either honest errors or just lazy career bureaucrats filling in the form the way they always have. But a good journalist follows up with clarification, and we're not seeing much of that, even when it appears on the DOGE website.
I've been a coder for the government. It's run nothing like a private company. Deadlines, team organizations, and oversight don't really exist. The systems are beyond antiquated and when you are put on a project to modernize, it often ends up getting scrapped.
"Maybe about 20% of all these clerical mistakes are actual fraud being perpetrated"
So, only a thousand people with birth dates in the future are fraud?
These "errors" are so stupidly simple, it just tells me there is no auditing in place.
Or no audit that actually results in action to fix this stuff. At most there's a report that gets filed, and probably immediately classified to avoid official embarrassment.
If you were a business owner you felt the touch as the fed collected it's unemployment tax. That money, minus the overhead goes to the states based on claims. BUT the employer's tax rate is based on how many claims their state has. More claims, higher rate.
Competence?
From a generation that can't read cursive, make change, use a slide rule, or tell time on an analog clock face?
You need a header for posts in the "comedy" category.
Foolzcon---dare I say that there are a number of bureaucrats that might be drawn to the convention just because of the name.
I worked for a large bank and the area I was in dealt with delinquent loans. We had two that would error on the report I monitored. They were originated in 6/21/213 and one was 5/30/202. the program could not handle the date. The originating system was one written in Cobol and did not have a check on the date. by my calculation those loans had been on the books before the company, or for that matter country, even existed. Data entry errors happen to every one. Just 2 though in a population of 40k so there is that.
If we take those amounts out of the "retirement" funds - and the heretofore undisclosed Swiss and Cayman bank accounts of tose employees, their supervisors, directors, etc., etc. - we might receover quite a bit fo the sunk costs. I think it should be easy enough to identify them and their financial trails. Assuming, that is, they aren't being hideden like the Epstein accounts/lists, though probably for the same reason.
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