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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

We'll never know because there is no transparency. Public funds should not be distributed in cash or with checks like in the 19th century. The technology to make stealing our taxes impossible exists, but interestingly politicians of all people have been fighting against recognizing and properly regulating it.

Food for thought.

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Checks are not the issue here. A direct deposit into the fake company's bank account would have had similar results.

That's not really true, it sounds like she skipped a lot of accounting where inconsistencies would have cropped up possibly detecting a conflict of interest if accomplices weren't added to keep her at a distance from signature access and payments.

Fraud against private companies happens all the time as well. There was an infamous case about a guy who sent fake $100+ million total invoices to Facebook, Google, etc[0]. If they had just stopped after a single interaction, probably would have gotten away with it free and clear.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706715377/man-pleads-guilty-t...

> We'll never know because there is no transparency.

How would you have recognized this fraud even if every number and piece of paperwork landed in your lap? The person created a real-looking business and leveraged her connections to get real-looking approvals for grant programs. If it wasn't immediately obvious to the people reviewing the grant paperwork who understand the system, what makes you think you or anyone else would be able to spot it?

The fraud investigation requires a lot of resources, investigation, and access to personal banking records. That's how they discovered what the money was spent on.

> Public funds should not be distributed in cash or with checks like in the 19th century. The technology to make stealing our taxes impossible exists, but interestingly politicians of all people have been fighting against recognizing and properly regulating it.

What are you talking about? There is no technology that makes fraud like this impossible. The means of transferring money is not the part of the story that enabled the fraud. Investigators had no problem identifying where the money went. The article spells out exact dollar amounts spent on everything from jewelry to property.

What is the technology that exists outside the banking system, cryptocurrency?

More alongside the banking system, but we could have governments spend their budget in crypto. They would mint new coins at the beginning of every fiscal year. The coins could pass from department to department being recorded every time they exchanged hands within the government. To exchange the coin for cash, any vendor or individual would have to exchange the coin at a bank while showing identification, and the bank would record the transaction alongside the individuals name and reason for spending the money. The bank would then give the individual cash, and the government would in turn give the bank cash. 100% of government spending would be fully transparent to the taxpayer, they could see which departments received how much money and what they spent it on.

It has some flaws in the system -- it essentially creates a new government minted currency and the banks would need an incentive to be party to this transaction. It solves the problem of lost government funds, and helps create a paper trail that anyone can audit to detect embattlement faster. It might impact the government's ability to fund some classified operations. You can't exactly say "I am {First Name}, {Last Name} and I am cashing my paycheck for working at the CIA" to the entire world.

What you describe is just a ledger, you don't need a convoluted system for maintaining consensus when the system you are building is naturally centralized.

Except for the fact that we have a ledger for government spending now and the pentagon cannot account for $3.5 trillion dollars.

> To exchange the coin for cash, any vendor or individual would have to exchange the coin at a bank while showing identification, and the bank would record the transaction alongside the individuals name and reason for spending the money. The bank would then give the individual cash, and the government would in turn give the bank cash. 100% of government spending would be fully transparent to the taxpayer, they could see which departments received how much money and what they spent it on.

This would have no impact whatsoever on the fraud in this article.

The person claimed they were spending money on approved purchases and provided documentation to support it. The government then gave her the money.

Adding crypto would change nothing, other than making it more convoluted.

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