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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

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Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#151

Post by renewiltord »

linkregister wrote: post #116
renewiltord wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typing “Trump” into that trivially reveals disparate outcomes. Then again perhaps “Trump says Maduro captured” is computing and science to these people. I have no peer-reviewed evidence that they don’t think that so I must admit it as equally likely as anything else.

It is a common error to misunderstand the base rate of an event. In this case, the frequency of media articles about Trump dwarf other political subjects. Or one could assume a vast conspiracy to explain the phenomenon.

False dichotomies like that are easy mistakes to make. Consider Reddit, no conspiracy, and yet overwhelmingly of some opinions. Coordination requiring conspiracies is naïve, but forgivable among novices of epistemology.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#152

Post by Redoubts »

em-bee wrote: post #104
nickff wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is auditing state-subsidized service providers fascistic? From this piece, it seems like the state auditor detected some fraud, but there was little follow-up from either the state or 'responsible journalists', so the sensationalists came in with a (predictably) extreme take, after which everyone started slinging mud. The sensationalism could have been forestalled by better auditing by the state, or journalism by lar…

to aggressively detect and interdict fraud is fascistic, because being aggressive hurts those that want to do it right but are not trusted. an aspect of fascism is to not trust its own people.

Posts like this make it clearer to me every day why Trump won twice

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#153

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

renewiltord wrote: post #112
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The man has nothing nice to say about Bigfoot.

The alternative explanation that he is against cryptocurrency actually is true.

Seems to be a bad use of "racist".

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#154

Post by em-bee »

Redoubts wrote: post #152
em-bee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to aggressively detect and interdict fraud is fascistic, because being aggressive hurts those that want to do it right but are not trusted. an aspect of fascism is to not trust its own people.

Posts like this make it clearer to me every day why Trump won twice

can you explain that please?

as far as i can tell trump is all about not trusting people but aggressively enforcing arbitrary rules no matter the cost. exactly what i am criticizing.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#155

Post by zahlman »

wredcoll wrote: post #70

Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so. What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback. The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens. It's "fine"[2] if stripe or vis…

> beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.

It suggests nothing of the sort, and in fact explicitly attempts to establish that none of this is intrinsic to any affinity group. The point isn't that the fraudsters in this case were of a particular ethnicity; it's that they shared an ethnicity, which enables the kind of internal social trust that fraud rings require.

Further, it suggests many clear heuristics that are nothing to do with ethnicity. The suggestions are clear and explicit; they just happen to involve occasionally denying services without proof of already-committed fraud, which you apparently consider unacceptable. But here is an experienced person telling you from expertise, with abundant citations and evidence, that nothing else really works, and furthermore that this is common knowledge in a well established industry specifically devoted to the problem.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#156

Post by zahlman »

wredcoll wrote: post #90
nickff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a TLDR; style take-away, the last paragraph is a good place to start: > "Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telli…

Ahh, reminds me of the classic appeal. "If you don't do now, the real fascists will take over!"

This is not a reasonable characterization of the text. The proposed action is not at all fascist.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#157

Post by saint_fiasco »

wredcoll wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire story of what happened in Minnesota, as agreed on by basically everybody involved including significant chunks of the government of Minnesota, is that convictions are not a reasonable measure of accuracy here. The story is that they didn't pursue fraud prosecutions in proportion to their severity. Responding to that with "but there weren't convictions" is literally just begging the question. It's very anno…

My ultimate take on the article is "so what?" Yes, fraud is bad. I agreed before I read the article. I've learned (from the article) that there was apparently some fraud in Minnesota, some of which was successfully prosecuted and, possibly, some that wasn't. If pressed, I would say the take away from the article is that the fraud investigators should have been more willing to use race/ethnicity and accept a lower sta…

There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.

The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.

A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.

But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#158

Post by tptacek »

sdwr wrote: post #81
650 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.

It's very indirect. The message is "the government is soft on fraud, partially because of liberal values", but the author does everything possible to not actually say it.

I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing.

Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that Minnesota fucked this up badly? What is that going to cost us? The attempts to downplay it seem pretty delusive.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#159

Post by bigstrat2003 »

zahlman wrote: post #148
patio11 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have reviewed your feedback on our editorial choices, and are comfortable that we have characterized the claims in the report accurately. We stand by "Minnesota has suffered a decade-long campaign of industrial-scale fraud against several social programs. This is beyond intellectually serious dispute." This is editorial analysis, informed—as is stated in the plain text—by the experience of several programs. Feedin…

Seriously, it's beyond amazing how much mud this thread has been flinging at you. If the analysis you've offered is somehow not above board, it seems impossible to point out the clear facts of the matter in a way that nobody would object to.

Agreed. I thought the article was an interesting look at how fraud in many ways acts like a real business, and how one can use fraudsters' tendencies in order to catch them. The discussion in this thread has been 90% partisan slap fights while ignoring the substance of the article. It's absolutely shameful.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#160

Post by zahlman »

kmeisthax wrote: post #88
wredcoll wrote: post #70

Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so. What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback. The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens. It's "fine"[2] if stripe or vis…

I've called the phenomenon of private corporations refusing service the "Maoists in the Risk Department" in the past. The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught…

> The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service.

How is it Maoist to refuse service???

> This calculus falls apart for the government.

It really doesn't. The judicial process is expensive and jail time isn't at all proportional to the amount defrauded (especially not when there is no political appetite for locking up a disproportionately "racialized" set of culprits, never mind the facts); nor does it solve the problem of recovering those funds. Further, the projections on the amount of fraud uncovered make it seem rather likely that a high percentage of those responsible are going free.

> We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".

The entire point of the system you're calling "Risk Maoism" is that it does not involve reinvestigation; it involves a presumption that reinvestigation would be a waste of time.

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