I was on a government project where I found out I was being fraudulently billed on my hours. It was towards the end of the year and my manager was trying to use up the budget of the client. Although this is normal in the private sector I told him from the beginning that you can't do this on a government project.

The project was $1M+ which was enough for prison time. He had gone into our billing software and edited my entries - it wasn't as if he was submitting the fraudulent totals only - he was changing what I was entering.

I gathered as much documentation as I cloud and went to a law firm. They told me I had two options - report it to the Government Accounting Office or report it to the head of the project, an academic.

So I simultaneously resigned and reported it to the professor. I covered my butt. I'm pretty sure the professor hid the fraudulent billing but I didn't look into afterwards because basically that was what I was hoping he'd do so I wouldn't have to go to court and defend that my reported hours weren't really mine.

The full project was eventually awarded to another academic group.

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talon8635 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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post-it an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Now that you know, do you feel culpable?

	▲	jayd16 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I'm supposed to dox this person or something? What are you asking exactly?
	▲	tzs 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		He just knows that someone on HN who is not using their real name has described witnessing government fraud at some unspecified point in the past and reporting it to the head of the project. He doesn't have any information about where it occurred other than probably the United States. He's not really in a position to act usefully on this information, so had no reason to feel any culpability for not acting. It is only an interesting question when put to people were in a position where they had to make a choice.

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jiddert8 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Everyone's fleecing the taxpayer. We have low-trust societies in the West now. If you're playing by the rules, you're a sucker.

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Der_Einzige 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	sitkack 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		What is your favorite western? Fist full of dollars or GBU ?

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tokioyoyo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Easier to say than do.

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comrade1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	Buttons840 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To prevent this situation the peons should be given the benefit of the doubt by the courts. In this case, either (1) the peon was lying about reported hours, the boss didn't notice, and then the peon reported himself... or (2) everything happened just like you said. Aren't there bounties for reporting things like this? At the very least winning should include reimbursement for legal expenses.

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dfedbeef 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Someone hasn't heard of qui tam

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was your mistake. The grant recipient or department has as much incentive to fully spend the money as your consultant boss does to bill it. It's a implied understanding.

Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time. Expensive projects are important projects. Important projects make careers. That is baked in several layers deep. You'd need to report it to a waste and fraud line, ombudsman, or similar.

I'm not sure its unusual enough to bother, though.

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comrade1234 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I decided to take the advice of my lawyers who specialized in the topic of government projects. Based on the budget someone could have easily gone to prison and it probably would have been me because it looked like I was billing 80-hours a week when it was just one of many projects and so I was actually billing ~20/wk. The $1M threshold wasn't an anecdote - at the time it really was the limit in project size for prison time.

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tasty_freeze 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ages ago, my girlfriend at the time worked for a company that routinely got SIBR (small business innovation research) grants. Such grants made up part of her total workload.

The crazy thing was that if she worked for 10 hours on SBIR stuff, then worked 40 hours on her normal work stuff (so overtime), the SBIR billing would get scaled down to 8 hours (that is, 25% of 40 hours). There would be no way to bill 80 hours.

The other thing that seemed somewhat crazy is that it was also common to have multiple SBIR contracts going on at the same time. If they bought a $10K tool for SBIR grant #1 and SBIR grant #2 needed it two, they'd have to buy a second one. So the tool would be out, then when switching between work on the grants, the tool would go into a locked cabinet, then the second copy of the tool would get unlocked from a different cabinet. I understand that firewalling like that prevents a company from "borrowing" expensive equipment for their own work, but it lead to waste like I just described.

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zulux 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You would have been fine: Your pay stubs reflected the correct time and your correct payment.

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comrade1234 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I was salary.

	▲	zulux 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Shit. That does make it hard. I suspect you made the right move to protect yourself from drama.

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fyredge 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Spend the budget or next time people will ask why you need all that money when you didn't spend it last time.

I've always heard of this nugget of wisdom but never really understood it. By punishing those who underspend (by making the next application harder), wouldn't you incentivise inflated research costs, or worse, fraud. Seems like a quick path to a positive feedback loop towards the degradation of trust in academic spending, leading to "poor government efficiency".

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Paracompact 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

It makes zero sense to me either, yet it is an omnipresent influence in who gets tasked to what in my work. At my level, I do not know anyone who endorses it, they merely react to it.

	▲	spwack 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Think of it the other way: If you have been given a $1 million budget, as a manager, your job is to purchase $1 million of Useful Stuff. The rank above you has decided "we need $1 million of software, go buy that." They don't know exactly how much stuff costs, so they use a dollar value as a rough proxy. If, as manager, you cut corners to save money, you're doing the wrong thing. They want the software! They don't to keep want the money, that's why it was allocated in the budget. Go buy us more Useful Stuff!

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But if someone doesn't need a big budget it makes sense to decrease it. It reduces efficiency if you force yourself to spend the whole budget.

	▲	yCombLinks an hour ago \| parent [-]
		But what if you need to save up to buy something that you can't afford in one year? Or you're trying to reduce cost in one place enough to hire a team to do some other project?

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SecretDreams 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is all simultaneously true and simultaneously disappointing. It requires a certain forfeiture of morality to be a part of this status quo. But, especially on grants between academia and the government, this very much seems to be the status quo.

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hsbauauvhabzb 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is it actually true, or just a trope? Anyone in a position to manage hundreds of millions worth of projects is smart enough to know that some projects will run under budget.

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Paracompact 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I work as a federal contractor. It's very true (epistemic status: my managers and project leads tell me as much and I act accordingly, I don't deal with it directly nor understand the bureaucratic larger picture). You will not get funding from Department X again if you ask for more money on a project than you wind up spending. Now, is that the sin of overquoting, or the virtue of overdelivering? For some reason, every agency treats it as the former, and I haven't the foggiest idea why. My coworkers acknowledge how stupid and perverse of an incentive it is, yet treat it like a fundamental force of nature.

Most solutions to this problem are essentially what the OP recognized as nakedly illegal---that is, exaggerating productive hours---but most contractors are savvy enough to do it in less auditable and more positively regarded ways, such as stretching out timelines (four 20-hour work weeks raise fewer flags than one 80-hour week), adding more chefs than the kitchen calls for, or funding unnecessary little side projects. Straight-up tampering with timecards is an impatient and dangerous way of achieving (IMO) the same wasteful evil as happens everywhere else in the public and private sector.

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pet_the_bird 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Dutch University of Delft systematically 'maximized' grants and shuffled the money between projects, according to investigative journalists of the NRC[1].

1 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/02/15/het-subsidiepotje-moet-...

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sokoloff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I work with people who are well smart enough to know that.

It’s also still a reasonable question to ask “well, last year we budgeted $15M and you got acceptable results while spending only $14M; perhaps you only need $14M/yr…” And despite its reasonableness, many people would prefer to oversee a $15M/yr budget.

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jaredsohn an hour ago | parent [-]

I think a reason for this is suppose the next year you run into some difficulties so it requires 14.2M. Now you have to fight to request an extra 0.2M added to your budget that you wouldn't have to worry about if you had 15M.

	▲	sokoloff 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Totally! And it drives me crazy to get very few questions and mostly positive ones if I underspend by 5-10% but going over by 1-2% is a massive problem. It’s little surprise what happens under such a system: logical people over-reserve.