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Comment by AndrewBissell | Hacker News Reader

Compensation for filing legitimate claims is an important carrot to encourage people with inside information to speak out. Whistleblowers are routinely subjected to intense retaliation and professional difficulties when they come forward, and the process of claiming and securing an award takes years.

Everything this whistleblower is saying seems consistent with dozens of other stories which have emerged of Boeing's corroded engineering practices.

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The point of the whistleblower program should be to always have conclusive proof. It should point the light at the problem so resources can be used to get to the truth. The monetary reward is necessary for people to give up their livelihood forever. You only get the money when it leads to something.

> Compensation for filing legitimate claims is an important carrot to encourage people with inside information to speak out

I've found over the course of my life that money encourages all sorts of people to say all sorts of things.

The lack of money, on the other hand, has caused many to keep their mouths shut.

That's nice. I'm not sure exactly what you think is happening here, but "make up a bunch of stuff and use it to pursue a whistleblower claim" doesn't strike me as a very appealing or sound strategy for ill-gotten gains. This isn't something that gets litigated in backroom discussions or tabloid news outlets.

Have you ever been in a courtroom? Not a lot of neutral statements of unvarnished truth pass back and forth there. Some do, but not many. I am extraordinarily worried about the precedent of paying witnesses for their testimony, which is what this amounts to. However good we think that our reasons may be.

Expert witnesses get paid for their testimony all the time.

Expert witnesses are paid by the hour, and still get paid whether the case is won or lost. The abuses of honesty in the expert witnesses system are still horrific enough.

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