Okay… do you not feel culpable at some point? Do you feel no obligation to expose these various individuals fleecing the tax payers? Your boss, the academics, and everyone else who participated or knows and remains silent. Obviously, you are now in the later group.
Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
Do people really have a duty to fix every wrong in the world? He reported it to the project head, and resigned. He ensured he wasn't a part of the situation.
I don't think you have to be a full saint to fulfil your moral obligations. He ensured he wasn't implicitly participating and reported it to someone who had a responsibility to investigate/do something about it. That is a reasonable amount of effort to rectify the situation in my opinion.
> Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.
The person you are responding to did "blow the whistle". They reported it to the project head. That is blowing the whistle.
Especially not when gp said that they expected the department head to brush it under the rug. If reporting things "up the chain of command" was really expected to root corruption out, and this fraud is 100% a form of corruption, then whistle blowing simply wouldn't be needed.
They covered their own ass, which is fine, in that later the head can't say they didn't know about it. But they didn't blow the whistle.
If you don’t have a duty to report, you don’t have a duty to report. You can’t predict what government prosecutors will do. If they start investigating and it turns out for whatever reason they can’t pin it on the boss, they could have pinned if on OP.
Think about it logically. If you’re the prosecutor, the guy whose time is fraudulent is presumptively the criminal. It could very well be that he was actually the one who was engaged in the fraud, but went to the authorities to protect himself by making it look like his boss did it.
Yours is unfortunately the attitude which breeds corruption, and also the attitude of the majority of people. "Not my problem", "not my duty", "covering my own ass", "not getting into trouble" and so on. The reptilian minded people like OPs boss love having you guys around, because they can't do their unethical schemes just by themselves, and you won't make a fuss.
As for the prosecutor; he is first and foremost interested in where the money went. If fraudulent hours didn't give OP an extra paycheck boost, then that money went somewhere else.
Look, you want people to get involved? Then it needs to be safe to do so. Recent history has demonstrated that whistleblowers have no such assurance. They risk damage to their reputation and future employment prospects; some even end up forced out their career of choice. This is how we reward them, and you expect people to just step up and fall on those swords?
Other commenters have pointed out that our justice system also lacks any means to determine how a particular case will play out. Personally, I would do everything in my power to avoid entanglement with the government, in any way shape or form. I am literally terrified of going to court for any reason, because Truth and Justice no longer have any place there; no, the Law sucks all the oxygen out of the room. If you think otherwise, then I would wager that you have never been through that system.
He did report, he chose to report to the choice he thought would have no motion. He knew it was wrong, he consulted with what to do, then he chose the action that let him skate by while observing prison-levels of public fraud. His entire monologue is self-serving while trying to maintain a facade of responsibility/ethic.
What facade of reponsability? Their responsibility was not being complicit in the crime and they accomplished just that. It's not their responsibility to prosecute their employer, specially if it comes with significant risks to their life.
That presumes that it's their responsibility to hold them accountable or, at least, that the other option is free. Given that you haven't shown either of those, and the statements point to the contrary, it's fair to say they are not complicit.
So morals only matter depending on how easy a decision is to make and how it won't affect you personally? This is coming back full circle to "has no morals".
> So morals only matter depending on how easy a decision is to make and how it won't affect you personally?
I see you cut the first part, only to follow with a "only" qualitative. That's not an honest nor moral thing to do. Specially given you still have to prove their moral obligations about the matter. Saying that they've chosen the risk minimizing option is a non sequitur.
That doesn't make sense. Obviously if I refrain from stealing I'm upholding my morals at a cost to myself (the cost being the free stuff I don't get). You seem to expect people to have morals at every cost to themselves, implying that they don't have any morals otherwise. You may as well ask why people aren't donating all of their possessions and living at the minimum subsistence level. Or why haven't you donated one of your kidneys yet? Do you consider it to be too high of a cost to yourself, even though it would be the "moral" thing to do?
Absolutely not. Honor does not pay the mortgage. Whistleblowers have no real protection, despite laws saying they should. If you blow that whistle, you will be retaliated against, guaranteed.
What you know and what you can prove are different things.
I think most people would blow the whistle if they had evidence of personal-enrichment fraud. Suspecting that incentives are producing strange outcomes is one thing; accusing specific people of criminal conduct is quite another.
Hilariously, in the one case I heard about where an MD was eventually fired for taking kickbacks from contractors, the department then struggled to recruit competent staff. It turned out he had only been skimming from people who could actually do the job.
He just knows that someone on HN who is not using their real name has described witnessing government fraud at some unspecified point in the past and reporting it to the head of the project. He doesn't have any information about where it occurred other than probably the United States.
He's not really in a position to act usefully on this information, so had no reason to feel any culpability for not acting. It is only an interesting question when put to people were in a position where they had to make a choice.
Your really think this would be investigated? An uncorroborated story shared on online forum by an anonymous poster? You really think highly of authority, don’t you?
It was too risky. My boss was scummy and even though I had documentation about my hours being edited he would have fought it and we'd go to court and at that point it'd be a crap shoot. If I remember right, the prison time was five years and there is no parole with federal sentences.
To prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts.
In this case, either (1) the peon was lying about reported hours, the boss didn't notice, and then the peon reported himself... or (2) everything happened just like you said.
Aren't there bounties for reporting things like this? At the very least winning should include reimbursement for legal expenses.
All your going to end up with this type of cases is:
* Years of stress
* Years of financial losses because lawyers are not cheap. And no matter how well you are innocent, not having a lawyer is guaranteed that you will fail.
* Years of time wasting.
And for what? The government maybe sentencing a guy for fraud. When its like 90%+ he will strike a sweetheart deal with the prosecutor.
Even worse in a case like this where its almost your word vs the boss his word. Yea, you can be the guy that ends up living under a bridge while the CEO laughs his way to the bank, being able to pin it on you.
Its already difficult with some proof... Dealing with this type of fraud case reporting, is easier when your not in the spotlight of the crime, and then reporting it. But if your unwilling part of it, few people want their neck on the line.
They do get the benefit of the doubt, but when you're a defendant in a criminal trial, simply having the benefit of the doubt on your side will not mean that you're going to have a great experience with it.
Sure, you go first. Make sure your work is highly visible and regulated for extra challenge mode.
Edit: I'll do you one better, there may be a reason that academics and others up/downstream from you gave an OK. They might even receive fees, and play 100% dumb when you try to blow a whistle! Just spitballing here.
3. You're always free to break into prison if you find yourself in his position, but you might discover yourself sitting in a pool of shit that was not of your own making.
4. Do you really want the parent poster to face the possibility of criminal prosecution, because his scumbag boss convinces the DOJ that the parent poster were the one fucking with the hours, and tried to pin it on him?
Honestly, having been to high trust places like Singapore for a decent amount of time - it's better to live in a low trust society. Singapore is easily one of the most boring, sad, depressing places on earth despite it being on paper a paradise according to education, health care, etc rates.
High trust in society correlates strongly with being anti-innovative. Europe is going through another lost decade in a row because it got too addicted to social democracy. The fastest growing parts of Europe are some of the lowest trust (i.e. Poland). Please fleece the tax payer more.
I love how we’re actively cheerleading third worldism now. Boring is good, bland is good, efficient systems that assume high trust are good. Unless you’re Norway or Denmark, you should try to make your country more like Singapore.
Boring is not good if you are interested in something that is not boring!
More fun always come with more risk. Everyone has their own threshold. So it is pointless to say that "Boring is good". It might be good for you, but not for everyone.
Fun fact: America got rich by being boring. America never went through periods of rapid GDP per capita growth like you see with China. Instead, it’s rich because it has grown at a consistent 2% almost continuously for 200 years, minus a couple of blips before/after the civil war and great depression: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/theres-one-thing-we-can-alway...
Boring, high trust societies are conducive to risk taking. High trust reduces transaction costs. And people are more likely to take risks when they can trust the system under their feet is orderly, stable, and trustworthy.
I just showed above that "high trust societies are conductive to risk taking" is extremely wrong. Every high trust society on earth right now does the exact opposite. It's a lack of risk taking keeping Europe and even Singapore in a slump/relative slump. It's doubly that for Japan and Korea got lucky as hell with its control of the HBM memory industry but without that it'd also be fked for the same reason.
There's no fundamental mechanism (at least that I'm aware) that stops a high trust system from awarding funds to a risky venture. If that's not happening it's a systemic problem (or feature as the case might be) as opposed to some fundamental mechanism dictating covariance.
I think in practice the conditions that lead to high trust societies forming also tend to lead to culturally valuing predictability which translates to a bias against risk. But that's not an inherent part of high trust rather that's just how things happen to be at a given point in time.
Yes I know it’s not all that rare, BECAUSE people can’t be bothered to blow the whistle.