When I was in my early 20s, I lived in a shared house with some other early 20-somethings. They were all off the beaten in some way, but more or less had their shit together. When I moved in, I certainly did not have my shit together. And I had never lived with other young adults who did.
I had been in the bad habit of leaving my dirty dishes in the sink, as had all of my former cohabitants. But these new roommates did not operate this way. One of them confronted me about it. I apologized, cleaned up my shit, and… repeated the whole behavior.
Again I was confronted. I apologized again, and next came the more important confrontation (paraphrasing, no way I could recall the exact wording): we already talked about this, you know what the expectation is, you just didn’t respect that. Well, that was true. It stung, and maybe it was a bit blunt, but it was inescapably true.
I didn’t even intend to leave my responsibilities for other people to take care of. But I was definitely, knowingly, leaving a mess they’d have to work around. Because I was prioritizing my own time allocation without regard for others.
Anyway, how all of that’s relevant: this township has done this before. It’s implausible that they’re ignorant of it, the second time. Especially as a cohort, where some will have better recall and a stronger inclination to improve than others. That leaves only the possibility that their motive falls within the range of motives for knowingly disregarding an election result, again as a cohort. Maybe I lack imagination, but I think the only reasonable conclusion is corruption.
Name one supervisor or manager of this township whose background explains my post history. There's a lot there, including some SQL code earlier today if I remember and probably a bunch of stuff about the field in which I have a PhD if you dig long enough.
So. Anyways. The township supervisor/admin who can pass coding interview questions and has a phd in a math-heavy field. What's their name again? Go ahead. I'm waiting.
Could it be possible that I have a genuine distaste for conspiratorial nutbags who turn local government into bored single rural white dude version of the instagram influencer game?
I do not expect any sort of personal or professional benefit for developing a reputation with this handle.
In fact, I change handles every few years in case someone decides to "stalk me" and "beat my face in". As is happening in this thread, for example.
I do think it's astounding that anyone could look at my post history and conclude I'm one of these township supervisors. I'm clearly not.
One poster, that is an obvious throwaway, created 3 hours ago. (all posts flagged)
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gofkurself
On the other hand you've complained about this no less than 3 times in different threads. why? How is an obvious troll account relevant to other posters issues with your own behaviour? This feels like what-about-im, but the difference is it's pretty clear that the other guy isn't being tolerated.
If you are just as abrasive in real life as in this thread I can believe it.
It’s not that I don’t understand the frustration, but at this point it’s a bit past the point of being reasonable.
I imagine they’ll get it sorted through swearing in twitter guy and then ignoring him as much as possible for the next 6 years, after which they’ll make sure to get someone one of their friends to run.
But who knows, maybe they’ll get along.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I can think of 0 valid reasons to ghost and undermine your elected auditors.
So he turns up one random day to do his job and is surprised that he isn't on the agenda. I repeat, he never even talked to these guys after his election, never checked in with them to even properly organize things. Instead he just assumed "they would know".
> and undermine your elected auditors.
Given how much he just assumed will happen and failed to properly plan and ensure will happen he is doing quite a good job at helping them with it. And after all that his idea of fixing things is to write a 20+ tweet complaint on twitter. If these people are as corrupt as some here think they must love that guy, they couldn't have found a more superficial incompetent guy for the job if they tried.
I’m sure it happens, probably in my locality as well. That doesn’t mean it’s acceptable or that it shouldn’t be scandalized. The big fishies in the small ponds apparently need to be reminded of the standards they’re held to from time to time.
From the outside, we certainly had plenty of folks calling us corrupt for not always getting 3 closed bids on every project or paying Joe under the table for cutting grass. Were these true allegations? Yes, but it wasn't corruption. What do you do when the grass needs to be cut because if it's not, we'll get rats in the town hall and no one responds to you calls? You call Joe who cut just your personal grass the other day and ask him to please just get it done asap because no one has time. This isn't done because we're trying to get a favor, we just needed it done quickly and reliably.
After all, there’s no ulterior motives in racial or sexual bias when it comes to hiring either, right?
Of course it’s easier and feels better to let the scant public funds go to people you know. That doesn’t mean it’s not corruption.
> This isn't done because we're trying to get a favor, we just needed it done quickly and reliably.
You still seem hung up on that there needs to be some form of quid-pro-quo or personal gain going on to count. That is not the case.
And well, there’s a clear difference in scale between asking Joe to cut the grass and not proactively putting the offer out (which still counts but is what it is) vs actively denying authority (however little) of your own publicly elected auditors for several years.
You are quite literally admitting to corruption. You’re justifying it for a common good, which… is emotionally understandable but also basically how well-meaning people justify interacting with every level or scale of corruption.
When laws are followed, people tend to be much more careful on the laws they write.
But that doesn’t make it right. If you are dealing with elected offices you need to deal with whomever is elected.
The part that was missing from the twitter thread is a reply stating the scope of the auditor role not covered by the CPA, and an affirmation that they seek to carry out this duty.
I guess my take comes down to Hanlon's razor: never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity. The council doesn't know what he wants to do after election and he didn't spell it out for them. It seems that they want to be (1) publicly sworn in and (2) change township processes somehow so that they can be a more effective community watchdog.
Humans tend towards greed and lining their own pockets, just look at any dysfunctional government that has ever existed. I would not be surprised that half the politicians in office in thw US are taking bribes or dealing under the table. There are numerous public examples, you can guess that its only the tip of the iceberg.
They won't identify that specific vendors, possibly related to the supervisors, are over paid for thier services.
https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200722048_20...
Edit: let's give them the benefit of the doubt, here's the most expensive one, still coming in $2000 under budget
https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200675174_20...
Was that money spent on a sprayer? Almost certainly yes. Who could check this?
For that, I'm just going to repeat your own words back to you:
> CPA's verify that the funds were indeed spent as reported
And then ask again what possible incentive the accounting firm could have to lie.
Someone's gonna get a Pulitzer out of this thread!
Typically how corruption at small scale like this works is:
1) Person A has a budget of $5000 to buy some equipment
2) The equipment costs $2000
3) Person B sells them the equipment, but puts $5000 on the invoice
4) Person B then gives $1500 to person A and keeps $1500 for themselves.
There's obviously no record of the last transaction, and there's no way an accounting firm is going to uncover it. They just make sure the invoices are correct. They aren't going to verify that the sprayer they got is indeed a $5000 sprayer.
Traditional way corruption works in my country is exactly that: the people who purchase goods using public money make a deal with the vendors, behind close doors: "I'll buy directly from you, and you can inflate your prices, but you kick back 25% to me". So the seller doubles the price, knowing they have no competition, pays 25% in kickbacks, keeps a nice markup (still sold the item 50% more expensive than they would otherwise). An accountant would find absolutely no fault anywhere: there's purchase orders, invoices, receipts, everything matches. They have no idea how much sprayers cost or how much a specific model should cost! An auditor, on the other hand, could ask exactly these sorts of questions (why was this a direct acquisition and not a public auction? what was the benefit of selecting this vendor? why can I find this model available at 1/10th of the price at a reputable retailer?)
[edit] Look, I actually agree with your take (what this auditor is doing is sketchy, he is certainly not taking on "the establishment" with his saga, his motives look dubious). But that doesn't make the supervisors innocent. He can be shady, supervisors can be shady - these things are not mutually exclusive. For the life of me I don't understand why you defend the supervisors, contradicting yourself in the process[+] instead of focusing on your actual valid point. Yeah, he should get his auditor position; no, he's not fighting the establishment, he's just trying to gain popularity by creating outrage.
[+] first say "find me one suspicious line item" then after several are found, you change the subject or try to pedal theoretically-possible-but-highly-improbable theories ("we can't be 100% certain the price was inflated! What if you found a similar thing at 1/10th of a price, surely that tiny town needed a premium sprayer that had to be very expensive").
Now I'm not saying there definitely is foul play here (realistically, more likely than not there isn't), but that's why the auditor position exists - to find out
Everyone knows auditors only have the capacity to look at a small sample of records; and that difficult, demanding auditors don't get appointed next year.