Cross posted on F16, but not enough people curious to look things up for it to get any traction.
Once upon a time, we had organizations in the US that would lie about fraud and illegal activities overseas. Then, when the organizations got caught, the leaders of the organizations would just claim that they had no idea that the fraud was committed. It happened over and over again, and some people got really hurt.
Then Enron collapsed, Tyco collapsed, Worldcom collapsed, and the leaders of these companies said the same things, "we didn't know" and that is how we got Sarbanes-Oxley (SARBOX).
The most stringent part of Sarbanes-Oxley is that it forced publicly traded companies to put internal controls into place that would catch fraud. It forced the CEO and CFO of a publicly traded company to attest that there were adequate controls in place every time they reported earnings. An internal auditor and external auditor had to sign off on the internal controls. If it turned out they lied about the quality of the internal or external controls when they signed the earnings report, then the CEO, CFO, and auditors could face federal jailtime. A lot of it.
Note that SARBOX doesn't mean that the CEO/CFO gets jailtime if fraud occurs in the company. If the company has adequate internal controls, according to industry standards as attested to by the auditors, and some smart guy figured out how to get around those controls, the company would probably face a fine, have to review and fix their internal controls, and no one goes to jail.
Pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered. Well, Biden and Obama screwed up enough that the meat packers are hiring as many illegals as they can find. The fraud we are seeing in the government is worse than Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom combined.
There is no way in the world that we would see the kind of fraud we are seeing in the SS office and USAID if these kinds of internal controls were mandated by law and agency heads had to attest to the quality of internal controls before they requested or were awarded any budget allocation. It would make the fraud of having 380 million active SSN numbers when there are only 330 million US citizens a crime, the head of the SS administration would face jailtime, and the auditors of the internal controls also face jailtime. The amount of jailtime would scale based on the amount of fraud. The heads of USAID would be facing prison sentences of counted in centuries or millennia.
We need internal control reform in the Federal government. It will be a great jobs program for the Federal government until it gets completed. It will take a lot of power out of the federal bureaucracy, eliminate tons of government waste, and give fraud reformers like Musk and Trump a huge freaking hammer to bring down on government incompetence and fraud.
Suggesting this solution is such a short putt, and paints all of Congress and the swamp in such a negative light. Why isn't this a great idea?
Once upon a time, we had organizations in the US that would lie about fraud and illegal activities overseas. Then, when the organizations got caught, the leaders of the organizations would just claim that they had no idea that the fraud was committed. It happened over and over again, and some people got really hurt.
Then Enron collapsed, Tyco collapsed, Worldcom collapsed, and the leaders of these companies said the same things, "we didn't know" and that is how we got Sarbanes-Oxley (SARBOX).
The most stringent part of Sarbanes-Oxley is that it forced publicly traded companies to put internal controls into place that would catch fraud. It forced the CEO and CFO of a publicly traded company to attest that there were adequate controls in place every time they reported earnings. An internal auditor and external auditor had to sign off on the internal controls. If it turned out they lied about the quality of the internal or external controls when they signed the earnings report, then the CEO, CFO, and auditors could face federal jailtime. A lot of it.
Note that SARBOX doesn't mean that the CEO/CFO gets jailtime if fraud occurs in the company. If the company has adequate internal controls, according to industry standards as attested to by the auditors, and some smart guy figured out how to get around those controls, the company would probably face a fine, have to review and fix their internal controls, and no one goes to jail.
Pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered. Well, Biden and Obama screwed up enough that the meat packers are hiring as many illegals as they can find. The fraud we are seeing in the government is worse than Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom combined.
There is no way in the world that we would see the kind of fraud we are seeing in the SS office and USAID if these kinds of internal controls were mandated by law and agency heads had to attest to the quality of internal controls before they requested or were awarded any budget allocation. It would make the fraud of having 380 million active SSN numbers when there are only 330 million US citizens a crime, the head of the SS administration would face jailtime, and the auditors of the internal controls also face jailtime. The amount of jailtime would scale based on the amount of fraud. The heads of USAID would be facing prison sentences of counted in centuries or millennia.
We need internal control reform in the Federal government. It will be a great jobs program for the Federal government until it gets completed. It will take a lot of power out of the federal bureaucracy, eliminate tons of government waste, and give fraud reformers like Musk and Trump a huge freaking hammer to bring down on government incompetence and fraud.
Suggesting this solution is such a short putt, and paints all of Congress and the swamp in such a negative light. Why isn't this a great idea?