Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago, when it began a project to make their organization auditable. From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years:

You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation:

They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organization in the world - with ~$4 trillion in assets (not market cap, but hard assets), and ~$900 billion annual budget, seven figures of employees, and operations spanning almost every activity, all over the world.

Such an organization is naturally divided into an incredibly large and complex org chart that maybe nobody really comprehends. Among all the entities on that chart are an incredible array of financial and asset tracking systems, computerized and manual, from new back to possibly WWII.

Your boss says that procurement is the most important thing to audit: An unusually large part of that $900 billion budget is the world's largest procurement budget and operation, with an endless list of vendors of every size and shape, from the world's largest companies - some whose core function is milking your organization without crossing legal redlines - to the tailor for West Point uniforms. And we were hoping you wouldn't ask, but we're afraid the budget and operation is decentralized across all/most of those entities in that org chart [edit: per commenter with actual knowledge, "the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized".]

We'll need you to stitch all that together so we can audit it.

Who is providing executive support for this project? Well, very few in our organization, from the leadership down, really want it - they all see it as a distraction and source of trouble, possibly risk to their missions and careers. It was imposed on us. Also, the project will be the target of politics (including from a certain highly aggressive party in Congress), talking heads, and general public Internet attacks no matter what you do. Everyone sees you as a useful whipping post.

Do you take the job?

As someone with 20 years active and reserve time, the only thing I'd really tweak here is that the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized. DOD is an Executive Branch department that operates on money programmed by Congress. Agencies choose, within limits of Title 10 US Code, how to spend that money, but the "pots" or "flavors" of money they have to spend are allocated in the Congressional budget.

Heh, most of the DoD is. But DoD also has non Title10/PPBE-programmed funding (foreign military sales, contingency and humanitarian operations funds, MWR funds and incomes, support-to-other-agency (e.g. the US Navy NAVWAR organization provides SUBSTANTIAL IT and cyber expertise to non-DoD entities and other federal agencies such as the FBI and DHS).

The DoD is like the End Game Boss on legal and financial edge cases.

As someone who seems to know a bit about it, do you take the job? :)

I, uh, tilt at other windmills in that morass (although my windmills caused me to learn about the financial stuff - turns out certain kinds of money can't be used on certain kinds of contracts, etc.). It's space in my brain I wish I could fill with useful info like song lyrics or something.

Where can I read more about this non Title 10 funding?

DoD Instruction 7000.14-R (https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fmr/Vol... is a good start)

Overseas Contingency Operations - https://www.cbo.gov/system/files?file=2018-10/54219-oco_spen...

Nonappropriated funds (MWR, etc.) - https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fmr/arc...

Foreign military sales / FMS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Military_Sales.

Thanks!

Give me the complete and utter authority, Congress off of my neck for four years and I will.

The problem is not technical, it's the immeasurable amounts of tiny personal fiefdoms established by the countless layers of middle management. You won't get rid of these without someone who has been publicly given the political backing to end the career of anyone resisting change. And that includes the Congress members which are on speed dial in some people's phones.

Your analysis of the problems is interesting. Do you work in DoD?

IME such internal politics is unavoidable in large organizations. Nobody likes it but it's the ocean in which everyone must swim. You can alter it to some degree, but there's no way for a structure that large to work without it. How do you manage million(s?) of people without middle management?

Also, it's not Meta. It's an organization that is responsible for life and death of hundreds of millions or billions, and national and global security, so control is essential. As a simple example, you can't lose track of the grenade launchers or nuclear weapons and have them end up in the wrong hands.

That's not how authority works. Whatever you would choose to implement, you will need to have enough buy in from those middle managers and fiefdoms otherwise you will end up with heel-dragging or, worse, malicious compliance. If you've been in any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.

> Whatever you would choose to implement, you will need to have enough buy in from those middle managers and fiefdoms otherwise you will end up with heel-dragging or, worse, malicious compliance. If you've been in any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.

Even for military officers giving orders in the field, edicts don't work. You need buy-in, including earning trust in you.

> any kind of organization that's tried to impose completely top-down edicts, you should have seen the kind of destruction of morale it leaves in its wake.

https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/

And now no one remembers what it was like without AWS...

Hell, it would probably take more than four years just to understand the problems the various organizations are trying to solve. If you rush that, you "solution" is bound to miss important nuances that make things worse rather than better.

Sure, you could assemble a team with that experience to short-cut some of that. But you'll likely need a long time to just build the trust necessary to get the right information. You're an outsider and will likely be treated as such.

I don't know anything about either the military or accounting domains, but it's kind of a fun problem to think about solving.

What data structure do you organize the problem into? Is it a tree? Depth first search? Breadth first search? Maybe you just pick a point at random and walk from there.

One data structure, one solution, for the entire problem seems like an unlikely path. Probably I would see how to break it into smaller, individual, more manageable audits, which seems to be what they did.

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