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Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

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Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#71

Post by mlyle »

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…

> [2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...

That's the real thing here. Concentrated power is scary-- whether it's the federal government, Visa/Mastercard, Google, etc.

At least power concentrated under the control of a government might be held accountable to the people. With private, concentrated power: fat chance.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#72

Post by 650 »

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…

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.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#73

Post by joe_mamba »

cogman10 wrote: post #47
joe_mamba wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video Oh yeah, the prosecution was sooo active that all the daycares listed as operational and receiving funding, had no kids in them, had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment 3 angry men would come out shouting at you. How many legit daycares have you seen that look like that?

Yes, because when I enroll a child in a daycare I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man and then I demand to see the children. But sure is suspicious that this place has no kids in it when I visit it outside it's posted operation hours. Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.

[flagged]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#74

Post by wredcoll »

tptacek wrote: post #66
wredcoll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the part where when asked for proof he laughed off the idea of using convictions as a measure of accuracy.

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 standard of evidence before taking action.

Is there something I'm missing?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#75

Post by notahacker »

tptacek wrote: post #50
cogman10 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because when I enroll a child in a daycare I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man and then I demand to see the children. But sure is suspicious that this place has no kids in it when I visit it outside it's posted operation hours. Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.

Right, everybody, especially the author of this piece, agrees that what Shirley did was bad and stupid. And also unnecessary, because we had documentary evidence from the Minnesota government itself showing the scale of the fraud here.

I doubt Patrick is the world's biggest Nick Shirley fan, but that's not really how it's conveyed in the article.

Shirley gets acknowledged to have "poor epistemic standards" (which is an almost euphemistic way of describing his approach) but Patrick goes on to say that "the journalism develops one bit of evidence...." and even appears to insinuate the NYT erred in reporting it in the context of the Minnesota government's response that the state's own compliance checks had found them open shortly afterwards but that some of them were under investigation.

There's an interesting point to be made that detailed, bipartisan evidence collected by suitably qualified officials that some daycenters were closed at times they were claimed to be open gets less attention than a YouTuber with an agenda rocking up at nurseries at what may or may not have been their opening times, but that's not how it's actually expressed. Rather it seems to be arguing for face value judgements of his video and against journalists that felt compelled to point out that whilst evidence of daycare fraud by Somalis in Minnesota definitely existed, Shirley's videos probably shouldn't be considered part of it.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#76

Post by [deleted] »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #18

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of…

[deleted]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#77

Post by blurbleblurble »

Take a look at the actual 2019 OLA report McKenzie cites. This characterization is wrong in ways that matter.

The "50% fraud" claim? It comes from one investigator (Swanson) using what the OLA explicitly calls "a higher level view, a view that does not require the kind of proof needed in a criminal or administrative proceeding." His methodology? If kids are poorly supervised, "running from room to room while adult employees spend hours in hallways chatting".... he counts the entire payment as fraud. That's not "billing for phantom children" it's "I don't like how this daycare is run."

The OLA's actual finding: "We did not find evidence to substantiate the allegation that the level of CCAP fraud in Minnesota is $100 million annually." Proven fraud over several years was $5-6 million.

Terrorism? "We were unable to substantiate the allegation that individuals in Minnesota sent CCAP fraud money to a foreign country where a terrorist organization obtained and used the money." They checked with the U.S. Attorney's Office.. none of Minnesota's terrorism cases involved CCAP money.

McKenzie writes "beyond intellectually serious dispute" about claims the primary source he cites explicitly could not substantiate.

Meanwhile the president is posting videos of the Obamas as apes and calling Somalis "garbage", having federal prosecutors throwing out arbitrary $9 billion estimates in press conferences.

See for yourself: https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#78

Post by martythemaniak »

tptacek wrote: post #54
martythemaniak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Choosing what to pay attention to says a lot about who you are and what you think. The largest fraud in the history of the country is unfolding in Washington, there is endless potential BAM content that would be of incredible consequence, but you won't find any mention of anything like that on his blog. Anybody that knows who patio is knows where his bread gets buttered understands very well why he would never say an…

No, to all of this. Talking about the largest fraud scheme in the history of the midwest without taking on all of Washington corruption doesn't make you a "gish gallop" or "Banon's flood" (whatever that is). In fact, it's kind of the opposite of a gish gallop. It's a single coherent argument. If you can rebut it, do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

A critical part of media literacy is not just evaluating a piece of work at face value, but considering who wrote it, why they wrote it, why they wrote it now, what they didn't write etc. The article itself is actually not really interesting, but why this person wrote this article now is interesting.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#79

Post by wredcoll »

650 wrote: post #72
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…

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.

So what is supposed to change based on that? Pay more for better fraud investigators? Accept a lower burden of proof like stripe et al do? What's the take away here?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#80

Post by christkv »

tptacek wrote: post #45
christkv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hilarious how short human memory is. To me Minnesota just seems like a replay of Tammany Hall in NYC

Then I think you need to read more about Tammany Hall, because it was not simply a widespread pattern of fraud in social services.

There was few social services at the time. It was a patronage system. Different rewards but buying votes all the same. My point is that patronage is a long storied American tradition so I don’t know why people are al shocked that such schemes are still ongoing. Republican and anti castro cubans is or was a similar patronage system.
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