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Comment by 650REDHAIR | Hacker News Reader

The punishment should be even more severe.

It’s a national security risk.

The federal government needs more internal audits.

More Internal (or external) audits in this case would have no impact. The organisation performing the tests was most likely performing their own internal audits, had that process certified and demonstrated that satisfactorily to certifiers and customers. The only way to counter the risk of a rogue operator trying to cover their tracks is to have a second run from another operator (the risk is then the organisation not the individual), or ideally, and more expensively, have another organisation perform the same tests and a third party confirm an absence of discrepancies.

I would prefer the latter as standard but audit is always a trade off between peace of mind and cost. You can demonstrate that a process is superior and mitigates known risks (however unlikely they are) but there will be those that despite operating under in "no failure" environment will ignore the low likelihood, high impact risks because their risk process puts it in the "green" and there are far more pressing things to spend attention and money on.

This is why folks like Michael Flynn should be no where near positions of power in the military hierarchy

I agree but I think the corruption has existed for a long time and it is going to take a lot of changes and legislation. Basically, maybe in 30 years or more.

I saw a gap to make that point and shot it. There is definitely formidable institutional inertia blocking meaningful change. I’m hoping history does rhyme and we’ll see an adoption of civil service reform policies by both parties like in the late 1800s

I’m sure you will. Post COVID hiring will almost certainly result in a lot of idiots as .gov compensation is way out of line with the market.

I don't think Michael Flynn did a lot of purchasing of parkas and submarine hull castings.

He definitely was not involved in the low level grifts but the fish rots from the head

He must have done quite a lot of rotting in the whole three weeks he was a national security advisor, especially considering that role has nothing much to do with purchasing components, uniforms, or anything else really.

Not sure if you’ve heard but he got in a little trouble for not registering as a foreign agent

Corruption spreads down, just look at the "mighty" Russian military.

If an org is corrupt (example: Trump admin), the competent, honest, people would stay away, and you just attract idiots, whose motivations might be different to doing the best job possible.

The government audits a lot. My brother works for a gov agency and he has a unit in his business unit dedicated to audit management. Iirc about 7 employees, who are very busy who just reply to audits.

They are an effective tool, but they don’t address all issues.

My experience working with the government is that audits usually addressed compliance with said audits.

Officials at the Pentagon boast that they can't be audited. Your brother probably works at a more reliable agency.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/997961646/the-pentagon-has-ne...

Who is boasting?

There's a big difference between financial audits, especially at a massive organisation's scale, and process/compliance audits.

The claims in that article from Senate aides are a bit misleading, as it's not that unexpected or unreasonable for a department as large and complex as the Pentagon to take years to reach 100% clean audits. After all, it took DHS a decade. It's because interventions don't take effect immediately, with process changes taking time to be planned, rolled out, and have an impact on reporting. As long as the trend keeps moving upward the country is better off than not having audits.

The US DoD as a whole has always done a huge amount of compliance auditing both internally and of suppliers, as well as financial auditing at most project and unit levels, outside of the new Congress-mandated top-level auditing requirement.

...it's not that unexpected or unreasonable for a department as large and complex as the Pentagon to take years to reach 100% clean audits. After all, it took DHS a decade.

At that point, DHS had existed for just over a decade. Pentagon opened in 1943. Is there a chance that they'll file a complete audit while USA still exists?

DHS didn't start from nothing, it was formed from a bunch of other departments and agencies. Like the Pentagon, there was partial auditing in place in that various levels and entities had internal and external audits, but nothing on the overall organisation level.

The Pentagon said it expects to get fully clean audits by FY28. That seems plausible at the current rate of change in their audits.

Lots an easy statement to make as a pandering politician or internet poster.

The military is an insanely complex organization with probably thousands of different financial systems. Whatever a “complete audit” is, you can be sure it will take a long time and get extended many times as congress paints the airplane in flight and changes the standards.

The issue is a political football.

Past some point, I've heard that more excessive punishments don't do much for deterrence. What does help is a certainty of getting caught.

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