Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

bitsaboutmoney.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 221 posts

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#81

Post by sdwr »

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.

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.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#82

Post by joe_mamba »

notahacker wrote: post #75
tptacek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 governme…

[flagged]

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#83

Post by kristjansson »

> 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 telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

Leaving this to the conclusion does the piece a disservice. One can quibble (and it would be good to here) the extent to which the government isn't pursuing the sorts of fraud discussed, but this as a thesis makes clearer the argument throughout for earlier and more aggressive pursuit.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#84

Post by nickff »

wredcoll wrote: post #79
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.

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?

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 telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

The public will believe them, because the public believes its lying eyes."

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#85

Post by cogman10 »

joe_mamba wrote: post #73
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.

[flagged]

Tell you what, go get a camera man and go visit your local daycare center. Post on youtube how they respond.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#86

Post by blurbleblurble »

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…

Did you read the actual report? The part about how a single investigator didn't like how some daycares were run, the level of supervision, and then used that to extrapolate a hypothetical invalidation of all payments to those facilities as "fraudulent"?

Democrats have rationalized much worse things than this, for example the ethnic cleansing (genocide) in Gaza. So with all due respect frankly I'm not at all assuaged by your caveat.

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#87

Post by blurbleblurble »

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…

That's what I'm getting from this article too. It's giving "Nick Shirley in the style of lots of extra words".

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#88

Post by kmeisthax »

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 doing fraud should never be given the time of day ever again. So the easiest strategy is to pick some heuristics that catch recidivist fraudsters and keep them a jealously guarded secret.

This calculus falls apart for the government. If someone rips the government off, they can arrest them, compel the production of documents from every third party they've interacted with, and throw them in jail where they won't be able to rip anyone else off for decades. Obviously, if we gave the Risk Department Maoists these same permissions, we'd be living under tyranny.

Well, more tyranny than we already live under.

But at the same time, the fact that we have these legal powers makes Risk Maoism largely obsolete. We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#89

Post by joe_mamba »

cogman10 wrote: post #85
joe_mamba wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Tell you what, go get a camera man and go visit your local daycare center. Post on youtube how they respond.

You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question:

How does having a camera impact the daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?

Re: Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes

#90

Post by wredcoll »

nickff wrote: post #84
wredcoll wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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!"

Post reply on HN