Hacker News Reader

Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

How expensive (to a corporation) are the low-level-employee expenses, fraudulent or not? I mean, nobody likes to waste money on fraud or strip clubs or extra steaks, but is the cost of AI Oversight more than you'd retrieve?

How about expenses for directors/VP/Executive VP/CxO? Does this AI look over their expense reports, too? I would guess that even legit expenses from that level look a bit odd, but having AI audit employee expenses but not management expenses could contribute to a morale problem.

Another place that this AI oversight could help society as a whole is having corporations/companies get audited for wage theft. Wage theft is supposedly the largest dollar amount of theft in the US, and it probably exists because audits are so seldom done. AI wage theft audits could have a large beneficial effect for employees.

View on HN

To answer the question about the value of "AI," it is a black box of pretexts you can use for leverage.

Expenses policies are usually grey enough that if you want someone out of the company without significant severance, using the expenses policy as a pretext imposes costs on the target they probably won't fight. If a company wants to keep someone, there is no end to the excesses they will tolerate barring any liabilities greater than the value they bring. If they want to get rid of someone, the mechanism and the true reason are usually very different.

Useful rule is to treat any company expense as a vulnerability that will be used against you in a severance negotiation.

Arguably, a more accurate Turing test would be one where instead of being indifferent as to whether we are communicating with a human or machine - we decide that a machine is sufficiently intelligent if it can provide us with pretexts for political leverage against other people.

The example that was so hilariously ludicrous that you had to have real admiration for the PR people keeping a straight face was when Mark Hurd was forced out at HP because he supposedly expensed a business dinner that wasn't actually a business dinner. (Which turned out to have almost certainly been about more than a dinner but nonetheless doubtless a trivial sum of money in the scheme of things.)

Visited a lawyer friend in Hong Kong (pre takeover) where client entertaining frequently required visits to hostelries of ill repute - all claimable and signed off.

Knew someone who sold his company and agreed to stay on for X months handover period. The new owners tried to go back and prove from previous expense claims that fraudulent activity had occurred and that they shouldn't pay some amount previously agreed. You need to be careful.

A long time ago, a project manager was paid 3X per month for a flat in Germany because at their level that was what they were entitled to. Then new junior person on same project came in, and happened to take over same flat and claimed X (with receipts). At the time this was just ignored - different folks different rules.

I always remember how they used to nickel and dime me about hotels and flights (I couldn't even get the "comfort" seat on two 9 hour flights in a row), however the Director positions and up (about 20 people at my office) used to fly First Class everywhere. I had to fly from SF to Germany to India in the worst, smallest, most uncomfortable seat for 18 hours in a row, but they could spring for First Class from SF to LA!

Another issue is that many companies (and most governements), have policies prohibiting the acceptance of meals or other gifts in excess of certain amounts, that I would guess are routinely exceeded. Having too detailed a records on expense accounts attached to dealing with those types clients could lead to problems for the clients and the company.

This would be motivation to not have some robot auditor - it probably demands enough detail that expense accounts could track down those accepting gifts/meals of too much value. It would be another case of "because we can detect it", sort of like DUI as soon as breathalyzers were in use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com