71–80 of 279 posts
Why would anyone care about an audit if there are no repercussions?
Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.
Why would anyone care about an audit if there are no repercussions?
Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.
Duh. You can't just put "classified alien technology R&D" as a clear-text line item. Just trust them, it's all going towards national, even global, security.
http://files.fasab.gov/pdffiles/handbook_sffas_56.pdf
The objective of this Statement is to balance the need for financial reports to be publicly available with the need to prevent the disclosure of classified national security information or activities in publicly issued General Purpose Federal Financial Reports (GPFFRs). This Statement allows financial presentation and disclosure to accommodate user needs in a manner that does not impede national security.Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…
I can imagine a future where new software is, mainly, written by humans while legacy software is maintained by ai. It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be instantly productive.
Once you have the detailed specifications the coding is relatively easy. Some of that can be partially automated using AI CASE tools, but that only gives a marginal improvement to overall project productivity.
Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…
It's not awful for a person to live in debt. Debt is a useful financial tool. Unlike a person, a government has an unlimited lifespan and debt can persist forever. This only becomes a concern when total debt exceeds some multiple of GDP. The exact limit will vary based on many factors including interest rates, economic growth rate, demographics, and tax compliance. Once that limit is breached it tends to cause a fisc…
This is the kind of theory that, without a concrete model of how the limit varies (or even with one, if it involves much statsitical variability) is nonfalsifiable, either because the probability of a crisis in actual concrete conditions is unknown or the range of variability is too wide to make strong conclusions given the small-n problem with real-world conditions, but at the same time becomes very easy to rationalize almost any real-world conditions as fitting.
Just to provide a ground-level insider perspective: We've been doing things in the name of "audit readiness" for a decade, and I just... don't get it. It has translated to a lot of asinine things like 1. Making sure that everyone's marriage certificates and kids' birth certificates are on-file, to root out maybe the one person in 10,000 who is erroneously getting paid an extra $200 per month for certain entitlements.…
I'm not an insider, but those sound like generally hard-to-avoid issues of large organizations, public and private, profit-oriented and service-oriented. You can't manage that many people, millions in DoD, without rules, and rules can't be defined to apply well to the very wide variety of situations in reality - just like an algorithm, they'll be inflexible. These kind of gripes are, understandably, in every large or…
Corporations got incredibly fragile supply chains by optimizing for JIT asset delivery, let's not repeat the mistake with national defense. I don't want the US to run out of vehicles, artillery shells, and spare uniforms 2 weeks into a real war.
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So I don’t know if what the government is doing is the best long term decision. But the US’s national debt could be compared to a mortgage. And the government’s income is massive so they can be in trillions of debt without it exceeding what they can reasonably pay off (never paying it all off, but paying off individual loans). So by your analogy, is it actually bad for a normal person to be in debt? Normal people hav…
Has the number ever decreased? As in, have they actually paid things off? Without actual numbers, U.S feels increasingly like a high-school bully who borrows money and then threatens with violence when that money is wanted back.
(I could be off in some details, but I remember my despair when Greenspan gave Congress cover for supporting the tax cuts by testifying that it wasn't necessarily a good thing to be debt-free.)
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I would love to perform static security code analysis to that code.
Are there any SA tools, that would understand COBOL?
Never used it (and hopefully never will), but yes.
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Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.
And what has failing audits led to in the past?
It's important to understand the history here. Failing the audit isn't necessarily due to some sort of fraud or abuse (although there likely are isolated instances). The problem is that for decades Congress never allocated funds to put proper financial controls in place so naturally the accounting systems are a disconnected jumbled mess. When they started annual audits everyone knew they would fail so that was no sur…