
Dear Bureaucrat, my job wants me to lie - David_Reed
https://www.federaltimes.com/your-career/the-bureaucrat/2019/03/07/dear-bureaucrat-my-job-wants-me-to-lie/
======
andrewla
I was recently at a medical office (this is in the US), and they had replaced
their system, so I had to re-sign the variety of forms that they make you
sign, HIPAA disclosure, etc.

They gave me an electronic signature pad and asked me to sign. I pointed out
that I did not have a document in front of me, and they said that they would
give me a copy of the signed form after I signed it. I once again attempted to
point out that I was being asked to sign a form that I couldn't read, and they
said, "oh, it's just a privacy disclosure".

A superviser (who was overseeing the migration to the new system) came by and
asked what the issue was, and I said I was being asked to sign a form without
seeing what I was signing. They very patiently explained to me that it was a
HIPAA disclosure, and I said that if I could sign their description, I would
be happy to, but I'm not going to sign a more formal document having only been
given a summary of it. They further explained that if I wanted, they could
print out a copy of the form after I signed it for my records.

Nobody at the office seemed to understand here what my objection was. I
overheard other patients saying things like "I'm not signing something I
haven't seen", so I know that I wasn't crazy. Eventually I convinced the
person I was working with to turn their monitor around so that I could read
the documents before signing them.

The thing is that everyone knows that these forms are completely meaningless
anyway. I probably would have been better off just signing the forms so that
if they ever came up in a court case I could just honestly say that I had
never seen the form before.

~~~
URSpider94
This is actually a violation of HIPAA law. My wife regularly schools hospital
and doctors office employees all the time on their consent practices (she has
a degree in public health). She will even call the hospital’s IRB to file
formal complaints. Things we’ve heard:

“We will have you sign the consent form after the procedure when it’s more
convenient for you”

“The first page doesn’t apply to you (when it clearly does)”

“Sign here to acknowledge receipt of our privacy policy (which we haven’t
given you)”

~~~
cactca
The IRB would not be the correct office for a HIPAA violation, unless it was
an informed consent form for a research study.

Most hospitals have a compliance office where this type of issue would be
handled.

~~~
freeopinion
For a specific definition of "handled".

~~~
arkades
Hospitals take compliance issues very seriously; the incentives are skewed
highly in one direction.

Consider it an extension of "HR is there to protect the company, not you."
Compliance is there to protect the hospital, not the individual employee that
may have erred.

As long as they make a good faith effort to act on the complaint, they
themselves are protected from liability. Whereas if they don't act, they open
themselves up to enormous liability, on behalf of a replaceable peon - I mean,
on behalf of a highly respected staff member.

------
Bartweiss
> _they found commanders were required to certify their troops completed 297
> days of mandatory training, when only 256 days were available for training._

I think we often underestimate just how bad this sort of thing is. It's not
just a question of personal integrity, or of whether the real value is a
viable one.

First, these practices create miscommunication. If some clever analyst
realizes training can be done in 256 days rather than 297, they might write a
report recommending 30 days be shaved off training time. And unless someone
who knows about the discrepancy gets involved, it's possible that "cut 30
days" will get implemented formally against the lower _real_ timeframe. (This
sort of thing happens all the time with budgets, where extra money that's been
informally redirected to a different expense is formally cut as bloat.)

Second, they weaken the integrity of the _system_. No matter how upstanding
the individuals, certifying nonsense disrupts a Schelling point of "printed
and signed claims are accurate", and so it becomes harder to react to actual
problems like the people cheating on nuclear missile readiness training. It's
the print equivalent of unimportant elements in a safety routine; changing the
routine is fine, but getting sloppy endangers the parts that do matter.

~~~
pjscott
Here's a podcast where one of the authors of that study goes into more detail,
especially on your second point:

[http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-
ethics-i...](http://www.econtalk.org/leonard-wong-on-honesty-and-ethics-in-
the-military/)

~~~
papln
The OP links to Wong's paper, but the URL is bad:

correct URL:
[https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf](https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf)

bad URL in OP:
[http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB12...](http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf)

~~~
rurounijones
A lot of that report had me going "yeah this is not good" but it wasn't until

"I falsified the [traumatic brain injury] report that changed a distance from
the IED strike [to where] one person was standing. So that way someone didn’t
come back down and stick a finger in my CO’s chest and say, “You need to evac
that lieutenant right now!” Because in the middle of [a] RIP, that’s not going
to happen. If I do that, I’m going to put my boys in bags because they don’t
have any leadership. That ain’t happening. I owe the parents of this country
more than that."

That I really had to stop and stare and re-read the paragraph to make sure I
understood what had happened.

That is horrifying but the worst bit is I can sort of see the reasoning behind
it, but bloody hell...

------
Waterluvian
The advice to "cross out" the offending lines has been interesting to me as of
late. I bought my first house recently and with that comes a thousand
signatures for all kinds of things. I ran into a few interesting cases.

1\. Nobody seems to notice or care.

I did this to a bunch of minutiae, misspellings, wrong addresses, etc. They do
make it into the scanned copy and as far as I'm concerned, the record. But
nobody seems to notice or care that it got changed.

2\. "Let's talk about it but I still want your business."

I crossed out some things about data sharing that I disagreed with on some
insurance forms. I got a call days later that someone noticed this. It sounded
like they had a protocol for handling it. This felt like a, "there's an option
to decline but we won't show it to you; you have to ask for it" kind of thing.

3\. "You just ruined this 30 page document."

Okay so she didn't say that, but she did have to make an effort not to sound
irritated that I crossed out some stuff. The resolution was a polite, "this is
non-negotiable by the lender. If you don't agree, then we won't be confirming
the mortgage today and you won't be closing today, leading to an expensive
breach in the contract with the home seller." She then re-printed the sheet I
"ruined" and I initialed it.

~~~
bagacrap
I think in the case of most documents you sign when buying a home, a) you
don't have a choice (except don't buy a home) b) there are way too many
documents to read (are you seriously going to pay the notary to sit there for
6 hours?) and c) it's all highly regulated and formulaic. Have you ever heard
an anecdote to the contrary, ie someone who was bitten by a hidden clause when
buying a home?

~~~
amalcon
Honestly, the best way to do this is to just pay an attorney who specializes
in it. They will just tell you what you're agreeing to, and you can actually
believe them since they are your attorney. It's not cheap, but not too
expensive on the scale of a real estate transaction.

------
inflatableDodo
Terry Pratchett nailed the expectations of commerce pretty well. Lies are
ingrained in our business dealings and openly enforced by management.

> _" Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed
> about all this. They feel like the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable
> titles, like ‘diplomat’ or ‘public relations officer.’ They feel they are
> poking fun of the whole thing."_

~~~
hollander
In Star Trek you have the Ferengi, a species known for lying. I like them
because you know what you can expect. Of course I've never had to deal with
Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say this... ;-)

~~~
inflatableDodo
> _Of course I 've never had to deal with Ferengi, so for me it's easy to say
> this... ;-)_

You may be dealing with them more than you know. -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farang)

------
deathanatos
All. The. Time. Legal paperwork is "it's just standard required legal
blahblahblah, just sign it" right up until there's a dispute, and then it
might as well have been signed in blood.

A job I worked at required that I acknowledge having received and read a
pamphlet on sexual harassment in the workplace. My understanding is that it is
a requirement of the state of CA that employers distribute such a pamphlet.
The state even has a stock pamphlet that fulfills the requirement, though
employers are free to substitute their own. My employer wanted me to
acknowledge that I'd received the one via the HR website … except the link
caused 500 Internal Server Errors.

I reported this, and even noted that if the link just goes to the standard
pamphlet [and I linked to that] that we could consider the defect in the
website "cured" and I could sign and life could move on. That part of the
message got ignored, of course; the people responsible for the HR site are
like "well it works for us?", and of course there's still pressure to sign a
statement that I've read this thing.

All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would
require my signature _up front_ before becoming an employee. (This was, of
course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)

~~~
im3w1l
> All of that after I explicitly asked for any and all paperwork that would
> require my signature up front before becoming an employee. (This was, of
> course, not included in what I was given prior to starting.)

I'd be interested in what would happen if you pushed hard on this point.
Giving people surprise contracts after they have quit their previous job,
moved their family and acquired a new house should not be acceptable.

~~~
ptero
Unfortunately, pushing hard (as in, "I will not sign this since it was not
given to me pre-employment") might actually get you booted. Companies
routinely update policies and a refusal to comply with those, even created
post-hiring, may be sufficient for termination.

If what you mean is "this policy sounds reasonable, but I cannot sign anything
sight unseen" any reasonable HR will just print (scan / email) you a copy of
anything they want you to sign. My 2c.

~~~
moftz
The first part is totally reasonable. If the company wants to change policies
and you don't agree to those policies (and are in no way able to change them),
why should they let you stay? Why should you let yourself stay? If a new
policy is that egregious that you would rather possibly lose your job than
sign in agreement, why would you even want to stay there? At that point, it's
in everyone's best interests to part ways before it becomes a real issue.

If the company actually cares about keeping you and they have any sort of
leeway as to changing the policy, they will listen to why you can't agree to
it.

~~~
orhmeh09
What if you’re starting out or otherwise don’t have the leverage?

~~~
moftz
If you just started, that's the perfect time to jump ship to something else.

------
tvanantwerp
This Dear Bureaucrat letter seems interesting as well. In response to the
query, "How do I deal with this inadequate computer system?", the response is
to use Shadow IT. I have strong feelings against Shadow IT, but I have equally
strong feelings about government IT systems being garbage. I'm torn.

[https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-
bureau...](https://www.federaltimes.com/opinions/2019/04/18/dear-bureaucrat-
how-can-i-work-with-and-around-my-agencys-useless-computer-system/)

~~~
pfortuny
Goodness, that reply is awesome in the detail and savoir faire! Thanks for
sharing.

~~~
David_Reed
[Running sarcasm detector.] Thanks!

~~~
pfortuny
Honest, I’m impressed.

------
komali2
Last defcon someone did a really interesting presentation on how to
investigate the government or government officials. Talked about how to get a
FOIA request responded to, where to look for information.

What really stuck with me though was a slide they offered towards the
beginning. I don't have it memorized, but it was demonstrating a sort of
"pyramid of public outrage" for certain actions. Sex with children was at the
top as most likely to generate outrage, hypocrisy was at the bottom, and
somewhere near the bottom was misappropriation of government funds.

~~~
treerock
> hypocrisy was at the bottom

That surprises me given the furore around the likes of Michael Gove admitting
to taking drugs[1].

Seems like a politician can lie, steal and manipulate without much complaint,
but hypocrisy is a major sin.

(Although it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between genuine public
outrage and the newspapers whipping it up.)

[1]:[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/08/michael-
gov...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/08/michael-gove-branded-
hypocrite-after-admitting-using-cocaine)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
Hypocrisy is only a sin when the other side does it.

Like when democrats push gun control and complain about systemic racism in the
same breath or when republicans blindly advocate for whatever law enforcement
wants while saying they care about individual liberty. Those things only ever
get called out by the other side.

~~~
jakeinspace
Off topic but I'll bite. What's the hypocrisy with gun control + systemic
racism complaints?

~~~
tonyarkles
I'll give you a Canadian example. Our gun control system has three tiers: non-
restricted (basic rifles/"long guns", shotguns), restricted (pistols, AR-type
rifles, an arbitrary list established by the RCMP), and prohibited (machine
guns, some pistols, some crazy stuff). Each tier has more restrictive
licensing.

For non-restricted, you do a ~$200 course over a weekend, send $60 to the
RCMP, and if you don't have any concerning criminal behaviour in your past,
you're free to buy as many rifles as you want.

For restricted, you do another weekend course, pay another fee to the RCMP,
and go through a more thorough background check. Per my understanding, this
check used to only cover the last 5 years, but recent legislation has, I
believe, extended that to your lifetime. So you pass the background check, get
your license, and now you're good to go? No. When you go to buy a handgun, you
have to say what you're buying it for, and there are only two choices: target
shooting or collector. If you ever plan on actually shooting it, you choose
target practice. Now, before approving the transfer, the RCMP needs
confirmation that you're a member of a shooting club with a range. Around
here, that's another $150-$300/year.

So at this point, you've spent around $700, used up two weekends, and spent
time on multiple phone calls (only open from 9am-5pm), and you're finally OK
to buy your first handgun. All of that, and where's the systemic racism? Its
not direct, but disadvantaged minorities are: less likely to pass the lifetime
criminal record check (got in a fight when you were 19?), less likely to be
able to take two weekends getting licensed, less likely to be able to afford
the mandatory fees, and less likely to have a job where you can go and sit on
hold for a while, waiting to get to the front of the queue.

While it's not explicitly racist, shooting (especially restricted) is
definitely not a sport that is particularly accessible across socio-economic
backgrounds.

~~~
mjevans
I believe your mistake is using the term racism when you mean to say classism
or elitist.

~~~
komali2
Systematic racism doesn't require a person somewhere saying "I hate black
people" \- it merely requires that the system be unfair towards people,
correlated with their skin color.

Systematic racism could affect someone because the history of oppression
against their race has resulted in them being born to a family that constantly
gets evicted from homes due to poverty, which exacerbates the poverty for them
and their eventual offspring, which means that the history of oppression
against their race continues indefinitely.

~~~
127
Correlation vs. causation. Just because an inequality exists, doesn't mean
it's caused by systemic oppression.

~~~
komali2
Black people in America experience more poverty than white people because of
systematic racism.

[https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02...](https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-
inequality/)

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ld6aYU...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ld6aYUf02jgJ:https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Racism/IWG/Session13/StatementJotakaEaddy.docx)

Even Ben and Jerry's knows this to be true:
[https://www.benjerry.com/home/whats-new/2016/systemic-
racism...](https://www.benjerry.com/home/whats-new/2016/systemic-racism-is-
real)

Would you like to present your alternative theory for why black people in
America experience more poverty than white people?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I think the bigger question is why does Ben and Jerry's have a page discussing
systemic racism on their website. Isn't that a few astronomical units outside
the scope of their business?

~~~
aaaaaar
They are very active in progressive causes. Perhaps when they sold the company
to Unilever they negotiated some deal that allows them to continue to use Ben
and Jerry website for their activism?

------
qqbXsiVvwgc75SB
This normalization of deviance can burn you for playing along.

In a previous job at an F100 company we routinely used contractors for a lot
of day to day work. Every other week we had to sign a statement certifying the
number of hours worked. This was fine for the first couple of years when we
only had about a dozen contractors split across two managers.

As our organization grew, so did the number of contractors, mostly under a
third manager at a different site. Due to peculiarities about how this large,
blue logoed F100 company dealt with purchasing and contractors, I and a peer
still had to sign the certifications instead of the third manager. We both
protested (verbally, which was a mistake in hindsight) but were told "just go
ahead it's how we do things."

Funny thing. That third manager, working out of our sight with their army of
contractors at another site? Yeah. They were colluding with the contracting
agency to overbill the company.

My peer left for unrelated reasons. The colluding manager left for another
company as the scheme was coming to light. I spent a week being grilled by the
company's purchasing team and eventually company lawyers about my
"participation" in the scheme. Because, of course, I had signed all of these
timesheets certifying that the hours worked were true.

In the end as far as I can tell the only penalty was for the contracting
agency to be barred from working with the company again (they closed, formed a
new LLC, and started right up again within a year). I got dinged
professionally as the only manager left holding the bag so to speak.

So, if you find yourself in that sort of situation where you're being
pressured to accommodate the process because that's how we've always done it,
get it in writing absolving you of any responsibility for signing off.

~~~
ptmcc
I used to work for a consulting/contracting company, with 6-10 reports at any
given time. I was responsible for reviewing and approving their time sheets.

Except that, due to the nature of the business, I didn't see or even
communicate with most of my reports on a daily or even weekly basis. They were
working on different projects under different contracts for different
customers in different locations. My manager responsibilities were an add-on
to my own near-full-time billable work.

I raised my personal concerns to my own manager(s) that I did not feel that I
could confidently and truthfully review and approve my reports' timesheets.
Their response was effectively "just go with it, it's the way it works".
Basically I was told to rubber stamp them with my name as the approver.

I don't necessarily believe that anyone was maliciously abusing the system,
but I definitely believe that casual and hard-to-prove overbilling was a
regular occurrence.

I don't work there anymore.

------
derefr
These things happen because the executives originally charged with
implementation of some external compliance requirement know that they have the
_power_ to implement changes, but don’t have the ground-level _information_
required to feed those changes. So these requirements get delegated down the
org-chart, to people _with_ ground-level information but _without_ power;
under the _presumption_ that a response will flow back _up_ the org-chart from
said people, telling the higher-up what is needed-but-unavailable on the
ground to actually implement the requirement.

In other words, the higher-up is trying to receive an error condition by
installing an exception handler in their part of the system, and then
expecting the ground-level routine to realize there’s a problem and throw an
exception, and for that exception to make its way back to them.

But, unlike in software, where you _usually_ feed everything as source through
a single compiler at some point, and so you can force every component of the
system to support exception-handling the same way; in organizational
“systems”, the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with
“exceptional” reports that cross their desks. They haven’t been informed that
it’s part of their job to keep raising these reports up a level until someone
sees them who can handle them. And because they haven’t been told that, they
try to “handle” the exception themselves, in order to present a clean
interface to their own boss—usually by just tossing the exception-report out,
and chewing out their subordinate for giving it to them.

If you’re a CEO, and you think you might ever need to use “exception handling”
as a way to collect ground-level information, you’ve gotta ensure every layer
of your management understands this in advance—understands that they won’t be
blamed for a “fault” happening below them, and in fact that this fault was
_expected_ , even _encouraged_ by people above them; and that those higher-ups
need to know when ground-level faults happen.

Sadly, even for organizations that that implement this policy perfectly... it
only ends up “counting” for the _types_ of exception-reports they were looking
for at the time that they set up the policy. So, for example, retail companies
know to reraise security reports; companies that employ tradespeople know to
reraise health-and-safety reports; etc. But these same companies, when it
comes to _other_ types of exception-reports, are no better than anyone else.
They learned a specific lesson, but not the general one.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
> the parts in the middle usually have no idea what to do with “exceptional”
> reports that cross their desks

Or they explicitly don't want to report them because it makes it look like
they don't know what they are doing, or they are afraid that it would create
more work for them and they are already overworked.

~~~
derefr
Right, that’s what I meant by “a clean interface to their boss”—because
they’re unaware that rethrowing these exceptions is a (perhaps implicit) part
of their job description, and they certainly don’t think it’s part of their
_boss’s_ job description, they think that 1. they’ll be doing something
they’re not supposed to be doing by rethrowing the exception, and 2. it’ll be
their own boss’s job to handle the exception, probably by throwing out the
report and then trusting _them_ less to get stuff done on their own.

------
gumby
Interesting they say "suck it up, lie, or resist". The other way is to push
the requirement further down: I don't understand this thing you're buying but
you have represented to me that it is necessary.

That's the actual responsible way to do it.

~~~
cakeface
I like this thought. What would it take to certify the form? 10 hours a month?
20? Can you redirect other people on your team to work on this?

When it is broken down to a cost (time) calculation then it might actually
become reasonable to invest in a better system for accounting and analyzing
expenditures.

~~~
michaelt
Today I expensed a $10 BNC connector.

How long do you suppose it would take to confirm that it was a part we need,
that we don't already have, and that I got a good price on it? And how many
such claims do you think each person in the finance department sees each day?

~~~
gubbrora
You can deduce immediately that expensing is cheaper than the time it would
take to investigate thoroughly

~~~
michaelt
I agree, nobody in their right mind would audit every such expense.

But he isn't being asked to sign that expenses are "essential or too trivial
to audit" he has to sign that _all_ expenses are essential.

~~~
vharuck
>I agree, nobody in their right mind would audit every such expense.

I'll bite. Our money counters aren't in their right minds, because I submitted
a small breakfast tab (at most $10) from work travel for reimbursement, only
to learn it was unacceptable to not include a receipt. My other meals had
receipts, but I had forgotten to ask for one this time. The accountant then
said I had to call the cafe for a receipt. Luckily, the place had a website
with contact info, and there was a helpful employee who emailed me the
receipt.

But I spent at least an hour talking with the accountant and getting the
receipt. The accountant spent probably 30 minutes with this problem. It was a
net loss.

Obviously, I work in the government.

------
TallGuyShort
This bothers me as well. I've seen an employment contract that stated any
hand-written addenda were invalid, so the idea of crossing out a clause or
correcting it is at least partially defeated. Some other things I've tried:

\- Instead of signing, I write (quickly, to appear like I'm signing, but
legibly enough that no one can later claim I wrote anything else) "unable to
comply", "documentation not received", or something like that. I haven't tried
this in situations where I knew someone would check, but when I have tried it
no one has noticed. If they ever attempt to use it against me I imagine it
won't get very far. As a side-note, I also write "Fake Name" when asked to
sign credit card receipts and in 13+ years not one person ever noticed, which
is how I know that it's useless for fraud prevention.

\- If I am asked to sign a very large complicated form, especially when it's
something that should have been sent to me in advance (which I usually
request), I will stand there and read it, making notes as I go through to help
myself understand it. When they rush me, I then give them the lecture about
how it either doesn't matter and I shouldn't have to sign it to proceed, or it
does matter and they shouldn't ask me to sign it without reading it. They are
welcome to get my money at a later date, or wait for me to read it. On one
occasion I had to sign a massive agreement to buy a TV. I stood there reading
it until a manager came over and, wanting to make the sale and let his rep get
back to work, signed a copy of the agreement stating that the store would
honor the warranty even though I hadn't signed.

~~~
joncrane
The signature is used for follow up when a transaction is reported as
fraudulent. It's never checked proactively.

~~~
TallGuyShort
What incentive do people have to sign their name correctly on legitimate
transactions then? If I plan on reporting a transaction is fraudulent, I just
sign my name weird and make sure they don't have cameras? I don't understand
how this helps.

What I thought was _supposed_ to happen is you're supposed to have signed your
name on the back of the card and they check that your receipt matches the
card, and it's a weak form of 2FA.

~~~
jerven
It is not about being "correct" it is about being consistent. If you have
1,000 receipts with an X then it is good enough for the cc company. The
signature matching the card one is only used when the value of the transaction
is high and rare enough. i.e. not for daily groceries.

For more important manners a bank might check and tell you if your signature
has drifted from the one you used before. On the other hand they might move
all your savings to a different country because of a fraudulent badly written
letter. Banks are banks

------
dkarl
I've rarely encountered situations where a superior wouldn't tell me on the
record exactly what level of diligence is necessary, and the few exceptions
turned out to be extremely toxic situations.

Which expenditures are "essential" can't always be objectively determined
anyway. The purpose of the rule is not to ensure that inessential expenditures
don't slip through the process but rather to ensure a chain of accountability
that can be checked if some flagrant violation is discovered. In the letter-
writer's position, it's probably only their job to be able to produce evidence
of who assured them that an expenditure was essential, which means they need
to put the right language on the form by which people request expenditures. As
far as I understand it, procurement teams exist because a dedicated team of
specialists can be more efficient and effective at procurement, not because
spending decisions should be second-guessed by people who don't have the
background to understand them.

------
danbmil99
I once bought a house. It was advertised as sitting on "an acre plus".

When we started doing the paperwork we noticed it was written as .85 acres.

But the tax map was broken up into two parcels, one of which was clearly about
1/4 as large as the other. They were both marked as about 40% of an acre.

Everyone involved in the deal, including my spouse at the time, was upset when
I said that we had to go walk the property and figure this out. Apparently
nobody gave a crap about half an acre here or there, even though this
represented about half of the property under discussion.

I finally got my way. The real estate broker took one of those DaVinci wheels
and, in his fancy loafers, in the pouring rain, walked the wheel through tick
infested woods until he had surveyed the entire property.

It was .51 acres

~~~
fred_is_fred
For the commission the guy got for doing the relative;ly simple job of selling
a house it was frankly the least he could do.

~~~
danbmil99
Having been through the hell of buying property twice in my life, I say take
the real estate brokers out before you even get to the lawyers and
accountants. There's no rational way to account for them taking 5% or more off
every transaction, especially with the price inflation of the last few years.

------
sanderjd
I got lots of dirty looks at my house closing when I re-read all the documents
I was signing. I had read copies of them the night before, but I wanted to
make sure they were the same.

~~~
breischl
did that same thing once, and discovered that they had swapped the numbers for
the interest rate and the term, so it was specified as a 4 year mortgage at
30% interest. Ouch!

The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment
later. Which I flatly refused to do - no f'ing way I'm signing on for
$20k/month payments and hoping they fix it real soon now, especially when the
fix is printing off one corrected page.

~~~
glitchc
I’m sure this was probably not a big deal. No bank would issue such a
mortgage. The numbers would have been corrected whether you caught it or not.
After all, your mortgage is a separate agreement between you and the bank, and
not part of the purchase and sale agreement.

~~~
mikeash
I agree that this would have been fine. But at the same time, it _also_
shouldn’t be a big deal to get a contract that says what it’s supposed to
before you sign it.

------
KorematsuFred
One of the best examples of this is US Student Visa system.

US Consulates in India hold hundreds of events each year to entice Indian
students to USA. They also actively tell students about their wonderful OPT
and CPT programs and how they can convert to H1B later.

When an Indian student appears before the consulate officer the student must
convince the officer that he/she will promptly return back to India after
studies are completed. Even though it is perfectly legal to get a student
visa, then work on OPT and get your H1B through lottery it is not something
you can admit to the visa officer.

------
neilv
This sounds somewhat familiar, though I approached what I saw a different way,
with different outcome.

I'm getting out of independent technical consulting (just as soon as I find
the right dotcom/startup employer), because the various business burdens,
separate from the actual technical expertise I provide, kept increasing, and I
could no longer cost-justify the burdens.

One kind of burden is regulatory compliances, and my favorite example is when
a client needed me to be able to check a box in a compliance-tracking system
Web form, attesting something like "I have an understanding of the FAR"
document. I'm by-the-book about such things, so I put tech work on hold, dug
in, and started reading. The FAR is actually not bad, pretty accessible, and I
imagine a lot of serious straight-shooter accountant types put a lot of work
into this, as part of making things run well, and I respect that immensely,
and am glad they do that. But the current FAR PDF file is approx. 2,000 pages,
and my expertise is in software. It took me a solid person-week to read
through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I
was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours.

(On some later burdens, I had learned from this, and talked with the clients.
Some burdens the client could help with, and some not.)

I agree with the need for such regulations and processes, but these and other
burdens seemed to keep increasing, one of the architecture projects that
would've made up for the overhead didn't seem to be coming through, and the
burdens no longer made financial/personal sense for my particular one-person
business. So, when a last straw burden was added (though reasonable, from a
regulatory perspective), amidst some reorg on the parent contracts, I had to
terminate a couple contracts for very positive projects that I'd been proud to
be working on.

------
thinkcontext
The CYA thing to do here is to create a paper trail of you asking your boss
and HR what procedure you need to follow to determine if something is
essential. They likely won't respond at all or in writing, send a follow-up in
writing noting their lack of response.

~~~
WhompingWindows
Do you really send two or more emails for every piece of red tape that you go
through? The overhead here is ridiculous, all for CYA from lawsuits that won't
affect 99% of workers.

~~~
thinkcontext
You only need to do this once. It establishes the procedure or lack thereof.

------
emeraldd
There is another alternative as well, require that anyone submitting a
purchasing request sign a document with substantially similar if not identical
wording and provide their case for why a purchase is needed. That way you
build up your own paper trail if someone submitting requests is doing so
nefariously.

------
avs733
This type of thing goes beyond normalization of deviance to acculturation of
deviance.

This article, rightly, focuses on the direct impact of individual acts of
false certification. But this type of normalizing and even requiring it likely
has broader impacts in how employees enegage with information and
communication around their job in ways that affect authenticity and intention
in hard to observe ways.

This is a scary thing to me...very scary.

------
xwdv
Has anyone every decided to just get terminated as a result of not signing
something? How does that go when applying for your next job and you say you
were terminated because you refused to sign something that wasn't true or was
not in your favor?

~~~
codingdave
I only tried refusing to sign something once. Nobody ever called me on it. I
got nastygrams via email. I ignored them. One day, they stopped coming.

I cannot guarantee that will work in all situations, of course. You basically
are calling their bluff, and it could backfire. But if they really are
bluffing, all is well.

~~~
avs733
I think the problem here is that of 'who's bluff are you calling'.

Usually the people bothering me about these types of things aren't the one's
doing the bluffing about it...they are in their own loop of compliance and
nastygrams. They are trained to be compliant and don't have a mental framing
that this stuff could be a bluff. That makes me a lot less confident of how
they will react or their willingness to be rational.

------
dmd
When I signed up for life insurance, I was required to sign a form asserting
that I have not "ever been instructed by a doctor to stop taking any
prescription or non-prescription medication".

Uh, what? Apparently, what's _meant_ is a doctor never told you to stop
_abuse_ of a drug. But that's not what it said, and I ended up having to go
the 'subversive' route and submit the forms on paper, with this line crossed
out, and an explanation attached.

------
howard941
It's frightening that this arises in the procurement context. I fear for the
good USG people in these situations. The Boeing tanker fraud wasn't all that
long ago, the folks fallen from the highest levels to federal prison.
[https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-
go-...](https://nlpc.org/2019/03/19/boeing-tanker-scandals-never-go-away/)

------
awakeasleep
Breaucracy hacking. I guess I'm a subversive type, because my first instinct
was to 'sign' the forms with the word 'unverifiable' in long hand

~~~
ballenf
That would still likely count as your signature. Same reason an ‘X’ works.

~~~
i_am_proteus
My preference is to annotate exceptions to what I am signing in legible block
print, and then initial and date at the end of each annotation.

When I sign, I include my full name and the date in block print as well as
"with exceptions."

Bureaucrat/legal types usually understand that asking me to sign a fresh copy
without those annotations is explicitly asking me to lie.

------
im3w1l
A friend had these problems frequently and said that if it was a
legal/contractual requirement, he would adhere to it to the letter. But if it
was some out-of-touch boss's boss's boss that made an unrealistic demand, his
inclination was to go with "how it was done".

------
maxxxxx
Seems this is common with a lot of processes that require review by others. On
the surface this sounds great and thorough but the reviewers actually need the
qualifications and time to review things properly. I have done plenty of code
and spec reviews where I really didn’t understand what’s going on and
certainly didn’t have time to get up to speed. So you nitpick a few little
things or just approve and move on with your real work.

~~~
hef19898
Looks like every "four eye approval" process I know. In the end just
everything is confirmed out of pressure to have a clean queue. And let's be
honest, just by looking at individual requests a _person_ can never have the
necessary context. Needless to mention that four eye approval of that kind
isn't even a legal requirement under SOX.

------
harrisonjackson
My first salaried job had an employment agreement that said I would pay the
company to work there instead of getting paid. I had it fixed before signing,
but I was employee #5.......

------
cwkoss
The author is not nearly subversive enough.

The really subversive action is to start a paper trail reporting every
instance of your co-workers falsly certifying in cases where they had
insufficient knowledge.

------
drdeadringer
Reading the article and the comments prompted me to wonder what would happen
if//when I say something to the order of "may I read it first?". As I age, I
feel myself becoming more cautious than I was [perhaps as cautious as I should
have been in the first place a la "everyone agrees to the EULA"].

------
macspoofing
There has to be a process around defining what 'essential obligations and
expenditures' means for the purposes of signing off on procurement - even if
it the definition is 'because my boss says so'.

If not, this is the typical disconnect between defining processes (and laws
and regulations and heck, even software requirements) and the practical
aspects of actually implementing it. I'm sure it sounded good to whoever put
this process together that only 'essential obligations' are procured because
defining processes is easy and fun! Abiding by them is hard work.

------
jupp0r
Shouldn't this be something that should be delegated down the hierarchy?
Presumably - for each purchase - somebody knows whether the purchase is
needed. If the person in question has insufficient information to make that
decision, all he should do is check that people down the hierarchy made that
decision and can be held accountable for it.

------
SimonPStevens
All the stories in this thread about people having to sign stuff without
reading it. I guess this just makes them all unenforceable in reality if
anyone actually challenged them.

Perhaps this is why anything actually serious I've ever signed requires
witnesses.

------
hurrdurr2
I have to deal with OSHA and other local regulatory agencies on a regular
basis. Having to deal with a bunch of unimaginative (or simply stupid) people
who force you to conform to poorly written regulatory requirements is just
soul sucking.

~~~
jancsika
They should force you to conform to the requirements regardless of their
opinion of how poorly or well the regulation is written. If those aren't two
separate issues then the whole system breaks down.

------
Scown
Complying with payment card industry (PCI DSS) requirements is an absolutely
insane process, even if you're vaguely technically literate.

Obviously not saying payment processing isn't an incredibly important area to
enforce good security practice. But it's a lonely place to be when you're
attesting to hundreds of ridiculous requirements relating to your overpriced,
off-the-shelf POS system and anything/anyone that touches it.

"Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely, yes." Cross fingers. Repeat annually.

~~~
empath75
Also has lovely requirements like having antivirus installed on your Linux
servers.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Is that wrong? Malware does exist for Linux, and that way you can also detect
malware designed for other systems if it ends up on the machine.

~~~
kbenson
It depends on the AV.

Either the AV ties into the kernel with a module, in which case it can also be
an avenue for an increased permissions exploit, or it doesn't have any special
kernel level capabilities, in which case it will never find rootkits that
include kernel modules to hide themselves.

Personally, I would be happy with an open source community based disk scanner
looking for weirdly named files and folders (there are common variants used in
hacks) and a locked down selinux config. Bonus points if you compile a kernel
that doesn't allow modules (but IIRC that doesn't preclude kernel level
shenanigans).

Interestingly, it looks like since the PCI requirement for AV is for "all
systems commonly affected by malicious software" they don't actually require
it of all Linux systems in all cases.[1]

1: [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-
pa...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/58345/how-to-pass-pci-
dss-2-0-anti-virus-requirement-5-1-on-linux)

------
brodouevencode
These fall into the white lies bucket. Largely inconsequential, rarely checked
on, and when things do go south deniable to a degree large enough for the
person to not lose their job.

------
DoctorOetker
Would it be possible to require similar signed forms from those below you,
until the bottom? If an unwarranted expense was made, the whole chain will be
responsible, and the discussion can then finally focus on how to _actually_
specify sane rules and requirements (i.e. normal volumes of low expenses get
ignored, larger expenses need to be vetted by multiple people _on the same
level_ etc...)

------
chisleu
They call it "shadow IT" but I like to call it "the cuff system".

Putting a fun antiquated name on things like designing one off, and
potentially dangerous IT infrastructure because you can't get anyone to fix
what is wrong is itself wrong. It's part of the problem. It's a growing cause
of personal information leaks and people shouldn't celebrate encouraging it.

------
hollander
How about signing under protest? So you sign, but at the same time you signal
that you're not OK with the situation. In the Netherlands this is often used
if you don't agree with the amount you have to pay for something. When you
sign under protest, you admit that you got the products or service you
requested, but you are not satisfied with the quality or the price.

------
naringas
so this is why (sometimes) my hopes for the future depend on mediocrity and
corruption, when the system is this stupid medocrity and corruption (which are
terrible) can save the day!

does this mean that the system is even worse? (the answer depends on how well
"it has treated" you).

------
tabtab
If you are between a rock and a hard place like in the article, it's best to
keep a copy of the email where you object to the language, and store a copy at
home. It shows you made a reasonable attempt to remedy the problem if it ever
turns into a big case against you.

------
glitchc
That’s okay. Bureaucrats are also forced to lie as part of their job. They
pretend not to understand (it’s their job to pretend) but they really do.

------
supercanuck
This isn’t limited to public service, the private sector is rife with this as
well.

------
throw20102010
There are two distinct types of lying mentioned in the article, and each
should be handled differently:

1\. The non-issue "lie" that was the subject of the original question.
Sometimes I get a little annoyed at people that take a form completely
literally and then raise a stink about it. Every form like this has an implied
"to the best of my knowledge" inserted in it. You cannot know for 100%
certainty that every purchase was completely necessary. Did every piece of
paper that was printed from that ream you ordered get used in a necessary
function, or did maybe one or two sheets get used for someone to print their
baseball tickets out at the office? Could some of those papers have been
stored digitally instead of printed? Of course that ream of paper wasn't used
for 100% necessary business purposes. But by signing the form you are saying,
"it doesn't look like there are any employees in my branch that are stealing
tons of office supplies, and that our waste seems reasonable." What you are
saying is that "I'm not personally aware of any fraud going on with the supply
order, and I've done some due diligence to check." What you are NOT saying is
"I personally tracked every piece of paper and staple in the office to make
sure nobody was cheating." That is not the expectation with these
certifications, and any federal employee fired for that level of expectation
can go to arbitration and would certainly win. Luckily federal employees have
probably the strongest employment protections of anybody in the USA.

2\. The second type of lie, mentioned in the anecdote about the Army officers,
is a problem but easily fixed in a way that you don't sacrifice your
integrity. This is the case in which adding the implied "to the best of my
knowledge" doesn't fix the issue. To fix this, you must line out the "297
days" portion and write in (a different colored ink) the correct number of
days that you trained. Then you sign in ink, and return a scanned copy to
wherever it needs to go. You probably cannot change the form in Adobe Reader
because most government forms are protected against changes, so you must alter
the form with pen. If the people that you returned the form to raise a stink
(usually they want a digital signature), you simply explain that you cannot
comply because to do so would be perjury. If they still won't accept your
corrected version of the form you can stall, but let your boss/commander know
that you cannot sign the form as-is because to do so would be a violation of
federal law- and you can't be fired for not breaking the law. Most of the
time, it falls out on your side. If not, you would have your defense counsel
salivating to take this one past arbitration to make some real money.

Pretty much every federal employee that cares about their integrity has
already discovered the answers to these situations, and I suspect that this
question is more of a straw man so that the author can talk about the
pervasive culture of dishonesty that exists in the workplace. He's right in
that a culture of dishonesty does exist, but he's missing the mark on where
it's a problem. It's not in the resource management office that signs off on
the paper/staples/toner orders or the Army officer that signs a training
certification form that has the wrong number of days on it (as long as he
feels his troops are mission ready). The culture of dishonesty is where a
person awards a contract with a particular company so that they can get a
cushy job in the private sector, or with people that accept a free trip to
Disneyland to overlook an issue. Those are the dishonest incidents that
matter, and they do not arise from some imagined "slippery slope" after
certifying an office supply order.

------
awinter-py
diane vaughan talks about this stuff in the challenger book -- she found
claims of fact by SMEs that were vetoed by nasa managers, and thinks that this
is one mechanism for groups to leak risk.

------
retube
oh dear lord does this ring true. Yours, someone that works in banking

------
sonnyblarney
This is a good thing to talk about but let's not pretend that this is just a
government thing.

~~~
jasonhansel
It's probably even more common in the private sector (especially in relatively
informal business arrangements where contracts consist of boilerplate).

~~~
sonnyblarney
It can only happen where there is real entrenched power and companies do not
have to be competitive.

Most 'private companies' are not at the scale where they have that.

I would imagine that 'Healthcare' is rife with this kind of thing, they are
cash flush, and the outcomes are intangible but existential (like defence).

I can't imagine people playing solitaire at any kind of Health insurer etc.
but I can certainly imagine them spending gazillions on boondoggles.

I have a family member who does 'BD' for Health Care, I'm certain from years
of chats with her that she does nothing. Meets, plans, talks about possible
future plans with other corps, they never work out. Looks into 'strategic
initiatives' that are secondary and irrelevant. She's paid handsomely. And
she's pretty smart, great communicator, certainly not a 'solitaire player' ...
but about as efficient. And FYI I'm aware of how even 'good' BD works, and
that it's mostly 'misses'.

------
sbhn
Liar and Lawyer, sound the pretty much the same to me.

------
deckar01
> I can’t know whether each item we purchase is essential. Many of them are
> highly technical.

> The subversive way is to circumvent the requirement to lie. Can you cross
> out the offending sentence on the form each month before you sign it? ... I
> have used this method.

This seems like terrible advice. It pretty much guarantees that no one is
accountable and the problem will only get worse. Don't sign anything until the
necessary evidence is provided and be prepared to reject purchases that lack
justification. Inaction and delegation are powerful tools in the hands of a
bureaucrat, use them.

