How do you judge competence of someone whose job and responsibilities are not known?
> How do you judge competence of someone whose job and responsibilities are not known?
It's actually very easy to judge, based on the fact that someone who has never done an audit before is now trusted to do one.
I mean, I wouldn't trust Einstein himself at age 24 to audit a small business, no way am I going to think that some rando, maybe brighter than average, will know what they are doing when performing an audit at age 24.
I also think that, if the story is true, the fact that they started at the wrong end of the financials is a dead giveaway that they do not know what they are doing.
IOW, if I saw someone tasked with designing a new car, and they started by opening up MS Paint and drawing tread patterns for the spare wheel, I'd certainly consider them unable to design a new car.
Even if we err on the side of benefit of doubt, even the smartest 24yo in the world is not going to be competent at doing even a basic audit when:
1. This is the first audit that they are doing, and 2. They have never before had any accounting background.
So, yeah, it's quite reasonable to consider them incompetent that the chosen task in the circumstances.
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.
Age aside, I feel uncomfortable about anyone new (even experienced COBOL programmers) being able to make changes in these systems, especially given their approach has been portrayed as broadly antagonistic to existing engineers and staff.
From the article, the closest thing they have to an evidence is a search query. Rest of it is pure speculation since none of the people who reached out to author has any kind of visibility into what is going on.
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.
That's complete nonsense.
Imagine you're trying to track spending of departments at a massive company. You wouldn't start by looking at a giant list of wire transfers from/to the company's bank accounts and work your way backwards to find what each payment refers to would you?
That would make no sense. Not only would it be practically impossible to do but plenty of resources might be shared between departments and lumped into single payments to a single company for many services, some payments or reimbursements might span several transfers, some things might be paid upfront, other bills may be only due later etc...
That would be a ridiculously bad way to go about it. And then imagine someone starts canceling random wire transfers that they think "look suspicious" lol.
Might be the first data you secure though.
> a top DOGE employee, 25 year old former SpaceX employee Marko Elez, has not only read but write access to BFS servers
> One senior IT source can see Mark retrieving “close to a thousand rows of data” but they can’t see the content because the system is “top secret” even to them. No source I have has knowledge of what DOGE is doing with the data they are retrieving
You think the treasury doesn’t have a metric ton of procedures, and laws, on data management, integrity, access, backup and retention?
Breaking these protocols by giving unfettered write access to this data to ridiculously inexperienced and ignorant goons exponentially increases the risk of data tampering and corruption…
It makes any kind of audit LESS likely to be accurate.
But they’re very obviously not doing any kind of credible audit. As mentioned, that’s literally impossible and nonsensical to do this way.
The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.
Here's the DOD proudly announcing that they now have clean audits for 11 of their 28 departments: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39.... Surely nothing bad is happening in the other 17.
But pretending that Musk and co are doing an audit by accessing treasury transaction records and that it will help with government waste in any way is laughable.
Again, literally no one would be able to make any kind of credible department spending audit out of the bank records of a mid-sized company.
This is the US government’s treasury we’re talking about here! This is several orders of magnitude bigger and more complicated!
Not to mention an audit would not require any write access.
If only they had a standing list of more than 5000 such improvement opportunities...
Welcome to the Government Accountability Office!
okay then...how many billions are completely unaudited?
Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.