I used to work for a not for profit. The level of legal graft was enormous.
We once got audited by a government agency. Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
After completing the audit, the gentleman running the government agency had a press release more less saying "I think it would be best if we were allowed to release our findings where they pertained to the expectations citizens have for the not for profit space, and not just where we find outright illegal behaviour. People should be able to understand exactly how much of a charities funding is used for its actual charitable purpose, and how much of its funds are effectively gifts for directors and staff"
Which sort of sums it up. Graft goes on it just finds a legal path.
People usually call i t NGO for non-government organisation. Not For Profit is just another euphemism. In casual conversation people usually say nonprofit. Or if they feel fancy, a 501.c3 nonprofit. In the US. Not sure how these work in other countries.
Try the likes of the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, the beneficial owners of Rolex who operate under the guise of a charity.
There is no requirement to disclose financial or charitable donations under law, and the company pays no corporate taxes as a result of being owned by the Foundation.
To me, it just looks like the natural consequence of the NFP space being the last stop on the chain of tax avoidance tools used by the moderately to very rich to avoid insane tax levels. (refresher: Trust(s)-> custom large whole life policies -> whole life policies fund new trusts and new life insurance for the next generation -> remnants of old trusts that can't be evacuated tax efficiently are donated to family controlled charity that funds family controlled not for profits).In a setup like that, the NFP becomes just another bucket of tax privileged cash to use to further your interests by way of cushy appointments to staff/board positions or, rarely, charitable work that furthers some economic goal of the family. In that setup what you see as graft is the real value and what you see as charity is the cost paid in lieu of taxes on the pot of money. The actual graft is unfortunately the behaviour enabled at charities that actually take average person cash through fundraising.
I have never seen a large NGO or charity where there was not a large degree of either grift, goofing-off, or a strong whiff of outright fraud of one sort or another. This has really coloured my view of all such orgs.
Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
Sorry but no, even medium-sized, enterprise doesn't have the exact problems that people complain about government. I can share stories with government employees and we have the same dynamics.
Large dis-organizations with many stakeholders have the same dynamics.
Governments at least are inclined to help people whereas enterprises aren't.
Charity and non-profit look to me like the easiest way to finance corruption with tax evasion, while making yourself (esp. if you're a billionaire) look good.
> Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
>This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
I disagree in part.
You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.
In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.
Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.
>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
I've seen situations like these before. This is why off-site backups are so very important. I've also been in the same position of providing data from a backup that someone was intentionally trying to destroy to escape responsibility.
This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
But if you don’t blame them it can also backfire. I inherited a bad codebase once and tried my best to improve it. But there was only so much time. When I left the guy after me blamed me for the still bad parts immediately.
It's always interesting to me how easily corruption occurs. I always assume that accounting double checks things and so on, but I've seen so many business where someone just creates an account and money goes out and ... nobody notices for years.
I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
When Robert McNamara took over Ford, accounting was so messed up, they would weigh their invoices and if the amount wasn't too far off from the expected dollars/pound ratio, they would pay it.
> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”
The larger the usual bills, the larger the rounding-error-level amounts. I've had some fun time with a vendor recently where they just forgot to bill a few $k for months, but remembered when asked for quota increase.
The invoice route happens all the time and is seldom caught. Recently the former city manager of La Cañada-Flintridge CA was charged with fraud. The scheme was he would send invoices to car insurance companies with city letterhead to cover damage to city property. Only he pocketed the money.
A couple years ago someone was also sending invoices to FB, Google, etc. Scammed them out of $100m.
I think I missed something. They later offered the guy the world to solve problems. He declined and then complains they wouldn’t provide the tools he needed.
Part of “name your price” should include whatever tools - up to and including ownership of processes.
Yeah I think something was missed. My wild speculation is that the person thats "causing issues" has a privileged position with the owners. The owners are unwilling to completely cut this person out of the business, and that is what he means when he says that the owners won't provide the tools he needed.
Great read! Yeah, these days if I get asked for technical advice, I’m always glad to put good effort into suggestions. But as soon as you tell me “well I want to follow some of your advice, but I want to do this other stuff the wrong way”, I usually say “Good luck with all that!” and away I go.
Author's note: Many readers, understandably struck by the severity of the events, have speculated about the involvement of organized crime. I want to clarify that, while the situation was extremely problematic and dishonest, that wasn't the case. The "worst parts" I alluded to referred to other internal dynamics, abuses of trust, and improprieties that I prefer not to detail further for privacy reasons and to avoid weighing down the narrative.
> I even worked on translating Archivista’s interface into Italian, since it wasn’t yet localized, just to make it easier for users.
A certain Italian-speaking area is legendary for its organized crime syndicates. Would anyone be surprised if that was the case here? Kinda hard to imagine it not.
Organized crime would be more... organized. There would be servers, infrastructure and documentation. Designed to say exactly the right thing to whoever was looking.
This is garden variety, SMB fraud.
"We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."
How you gonna leave out the good parts like circa<year> so we can gauge the tech available then? Also, what about the tools you used to sync/backup to owner's house? My personal query, why did you move to freebsd? was it a different application/use? This is an awesome story, our modern approach would be to install nextcloud/owncloud with collaboration and rsync/syncthing to an offsite NAS (owner's house).
As for your decision, I would have agreed to a directorship and hired a local MSP to do things the way I wanted. This would have allowed you to have your cake and eat it too. A lot of times, in these situations, all you need is trusted eyes and ears from outside the corrupted fold. This principle is used in the military and diplomatic core, there is a staffing structure, and then there is an XO, who is hired and controlled from HQ. This XO answers to HQ, not the local structure.
We're talking around 2009 — I don't recall the exact period, but that’s the era. For backups, I used rsync-based syncs and kept history by using hard links and rsync on top of those. I also had a Perl script that automated the whole thing, but I’ve long since forgotten its name.
As for the rest — I hear you, and I totally agree. But at the time, I was young and more focused on building things with healthy clients who genuinely wanted to create something good, rather than trying to salvage a situation that, honestly, was nearly beyond saving.
I switched the ALIX to FreeBSD for other tasks, and FreeBSD (with its native read only support) was perfect for the new workload.
Readit News
We once got audited by a government agency. Said government agency had been extensively burdened with restrictions in its operation by lobbying from the NFP space.
After completing the audit, the gentleman running the government agency had a press release more less saying "I think it would be best if we were allowed to release our findings where they pertained to the expectations citizens have for the not for profit space, and not just where we find outright illegal behaviour. People should be able to understand exactly how much of a charities funding is used for its actual charitable purpose, and how much of its funds are effectively gifts for directors and staff"
Which sort of sums it up. Graft goes on it just finds a legal path.
Covers full charities, and other legal statuses like public beneficials etc.
There is no requirement to disclose financial or charitable donations under law, and the company pays no corporate taxes as a result of being owned by the Foundation.
Its also my experience that the reverse is true, small charities tend to be staffed by true believers who are working as hard as possible towards their goal.
Large dis-organizations with many stakeholders have the same dynamics.
Governments at least are inclined to help people whereas enterprises aren't.
This is incorrect and dishonest. The restrictions come from government employees and elected officials. The lobbyists cannot force them to do anything. These are facts, not opinions.
If your decision makers are corrupt and not acting in your best interests, then you need to hold them accountable for that. I've never heard a single person on HN (or real life in my country) say "I was tracking the bills that my senators voted on, noticed they voted for something bad, and sent them a letter", or voted against them next election cycle, or anything similar, because almost nobody does it.
This is a failure of democracy, on the part of the citizens, because democracy isn't just voting - it's monitoring the behavior of those you voted for and holding them accountable. (I'm not saying anything about people you didn't vote for, for obvious reasons)
If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Sure, lobbying needs to be much more regulated or outright banned in many countries (including my own) - but even an individual of below-average intelligence can see why even if lobbying is banned, all of the above still applies - if you're not keeping track of your representatives actions, even if they're not being lobbied, they can and will continue to act in their own interests and sacrifice yours, and you're failing your country.
Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
I disagree in part.
You are correct that politicians should share some of the blame, but as we know the breed of insect known as politician lacks any kind of spine, they tend to bow down to any lobby that is large enough to cause them any electoral fright.
In this instance, we had a government scrap this regulatory body entirely, and the next government restored it but "upon consultation" left the teeth out.
Everyone sucks here as they say on reddit.
>If you are not keeping track of what your representatives are doing, and voting for them anyway, you are actively making the situation worse.
Classic beige dictatorship. Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan. They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
>Lobbying is not the root problem - corruption and lack of accountability are.
Honestly its the entire system as designed. Theres no way to sting a government over a single issue. Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
This story even hints at a common theme that happens even when people aren't trying to destroy data - that some people will tear down whatever they inherit, then blame their predecessors for the problems that result.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/195lc8/whe...
(Reddit, because Dilberts creator and his website have gone off the rails)
I've even created automated invoices for some companies and realized that some data was missing for months. And yet they got paid significant amounts. I realized that the invoices could have been for just about anything and they would have gotten paid ...
> Ford Motor Company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars every month. It was impossible to give an exact number because there was no accounting system. “Can you believe it?” Henry II later remembered. “In one department they figured their costs by weighing the pile of invoices on a scale”
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A couple years ago someone was also sending invoices to FB, Google, etc. Scammed them out of $100m.
Part of “name your price” should include whatever tools - up to and including ownership of processes.
A certain Italian-speaking area is legendary for its organized crime syndicates. Would anyone be surprised if that was the case here? Kinda hard to imagine it not.
This is garden variety, SMB fraud.
"We trust Tim, and never had a problem so we don't need to invest in all these controls. Tim is really vehement that the controls are useless and he's refusing to participate. No we won't make him comply. No we don't see any conflict here. Please continue to fix the problem anyway."
Dead Comment
As for the rest — I hear you, and I totally agree. But at the time, I was young and more focused on building things with healthy clients who genuinely wanted to create something good, rather than trying to salvage a situation that, honestly, was nearly beyond saving.
I switched the ALIX to FreeBSD for other tasks, and FreeBSD (with its native read only support) was perfect for the new workload.