All you need is courage, or so they think
All you need is courage, or so they think
Coming up face to face with fraud can be tough, but you can be tough too, so plow through!
Do the work, hold on to your heart, from it comes courage: both words share the same etymology.
Therefore, little dancer, take your courage in both hands!
Speak up, stand up, work your magics, and bring it on!
Do what’s right and do it right. That’s your job.
We’ll thank you for the trouble, promise!
We’ll congratulate you for the courage that it took to identify and bring up the case,
All tied up in an executive summary, all wrapped up with a perfect bow.
All you need is courage, at least they say so.
Tell the suburban-living, happily retired couple, that their condo fees are being diverted to pay for the Land Rover of the property manager, and they’ll find a million reasons to smile as they mail in their pre-authorization form for the special assessment the property manager told the neighborhood was impossible to avoid.
They’ll pay, and if you roll your eyes at the property manager, they’ll get mad at you. Aging infrastructures and aging communities make for the perfect feast to the vultures coming to prey on them in a scenario at least as old as Jesus’ ministry:
“He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.” (John 10:12-13)
The condo board members will sell their houses and ensure that the minutes of their meetings do not reflect their shortcomings, so that the condo board members avoid the special assessment altogether and legal proceedings involving their “responsibility” for the massacre.
The former president of the condo board, who used to rule the neighborhood alone until the property manager came over demanding a share in the feast, will not sell her house. She knows better. Since she’s a realtor, she’ll sell the houses of the board members, and she’ll make her commissions to cover more than her share of the special assessment, to which her friends contributed anyway, since she lavishly spent the condo’s money on a painting job she gave her friend, in the prior years before came the new property manager, leading up to the special assessment, the two of them and their friends created, hand in hand, together.
The former president of the condo board is an excellent deal maker, she sells other people’s stuff upon hefty commissions, and she covers up like no other, asking the painter to hide rotting wood under the roofs all the while convincing the community that the fences pose an imminent liability threat as well as an eyesore and should all be replaced, immediately, without following the investment plan, i.e. what the independent engineering firm recommended.
She’ll get the fencing job started before she gets kicked out of the board by the next cycle of elections, hiring one of the minions of the property manager, who does repairs for free at the property manager’s house, and who also happens to be a longtime friend of the latest imbecile that got his free ticket to the three-people show called: the condo board, guardians of the neighborhood, overseers of the budget and of the property manager, aka little thumb rulers over a multi-million-dollar production.
If that wasn’t a perfect picture already, picture this: the board members are not even hired hands! They serve their community for free! Three volunteers to guard the flock from the attacks of anyone who understands that there is easy money to be made when you have aging infrastructures and aging communities, and that marketing oneself as a “condo property manager” or a “condo lawyer” or a “condo realtor” is the ultimate scheme to tapping into other people’s piles of money, roaming freely among the flock, with the audacity of the Sheriff of Nottingham and the impunity of the Pharisees, at the time of Jesus Christ, among the man-made rules and the ungodly rulers.
That’s one of the ways governance goes wrong and freely
In the not-so-complex, non-for-profit, mostly volunteer world.
Tell the CFA-credential holder executive, proudly watching over billions of dollars, ultimately responsible for the mountains of money placed under the care of the financial institution he is one of the heads of, that two unsophisticated men managed to rob the bank of half a million dollar, in a plot as ridiculous as one that would come out of Homer Simpson’s rambling at the bar, after his third beer, except that the scheme involves public money and is not funny for one bit, and no current procedure prevents such robbery, and the CFA-credential holder executive will smile, gently, asking you, kindly, if you’ve ever played in the big guys world, where financial transactions amount in the multi-million dollars before an analyst can snatch 10 minutes of the attention of the very busy, very important, even more influent, CFA-credential holder executive, so he asks, boldly and respectfully, without an ounce of sarcasm: “Ok, I hear you, but why should I care?”, because the CFA-credential holder executive seriously doesn’t understand why he should care, as in spend his precious time and energy, doing something about the organization getting defrauded of less than a million dollars, baby.
The CFA-credential holder executive doesn’t mean wrong, he honestly doesn't see the point: it’s all insignificant to him, because in his world, half a million dollars is considered immaterial. Bring the man back to his senses and remind him that the bounty these two imbeciles are getting away with, freely, is worth more than the average mortgage on a home, and suddenly, the man remembers the scale of the grand scheme of things. You can even see him make a rule of thumbs and put the easily snatched bounty in perspective to his own salary, and now you finally got him a tiny bit angry.
When did the CFA-credential holder executive lose sight of the proportions of things? When did he stop caring? Nobody could ever tell, not even him, since he’s a CFA-credential holder and has been in the position to investing other people’s money, and his own, for well over two decades, and things only got exponentially. The higher he got, the more money he managed, and the more he needed to rely on others to mitigate the risk of losing the money under his care.
It’s nobody’s fault, he doesn’t “not care”, he simply has gazillion fishes to fry, and the two wanabee Homer Simpson are not among the big guys, hence they are small fishes, so they swim through the net, and call their friends upon they return, their pockets full of public money, happy to share the plot with their community, only for more of them to return, stealing more public funds, one penny at a time, up to at least half a million dollars at once, unbothered, i.e. freely, without any consequences, and the pockets overflowing with money.
“He who is a hired hand and not a shepherd, who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.” (John 10:12-13)
Now that you got his attention, nail the CFA-credential holder executive’s coffin together with yours via an analogy. Say that there will always be fraud, so the aim isn’t fraud nil, it’s “let’s be defrauded only by the sophisticated”. In this case, the scheme is so rudimentary, it really makes everyone look like a flock of headless chickens, and that’s below the standards of this administration.
The executive looks scared, and since this is the only time you’ll get a chance at squeezing one of your files on his overflowing desk, you have the hubris to add, as if to remind the man of the origins of his work, that the return on a loan that ends up as a write-off due to fraud is zero, minus the lost capital and all the costs incurred to put the deal on the books in the first place, and then try to limit the damages, before giving in and calling the whole thing off, with an under-the-radar write-off, therefore making all other risk analysis vain, and the man will now say out loud that he has zero tolerance for fraud, and that you have his permission to shake the trees of anyone under him who would dare not to care.
Even though he started off as a caring man, even though he wishes he could prevent the waste and abuses over public funds, the executive will only be able to kind of care about the issue of two random dudes snatching part of the mountains of money under his care. The organization is the perfect victim, because its mission is to help businesses. Losing some to abuse comes with the territory, and once the file goes back down the drains of the controls over all sorts of risks, middle management who didn’t lift their little fingers against fraud before you resolved to go way above their heads, after they threw countless monkey wrenches in your investigative work, will make you pay for the insolence with which you demonstrated the bullshitness of their job, the incompetence with which they have handled risks before, and the extent of the pen-pusher factory they have been ruling over.
Since you’ve upset several parties, the backstabbing will come from everywhere, incompetent middlemen encouraged by the lawyers, first to declare:
“How can you tell it’s fraud! Be careful with the words you write! Choose your battles wisely! This is a serious matter! You don’t want to become our liability! We’re the lawyers, we know better, on just about anything, particularly on all significant matters, all things considered, truly.”
They’ll mock you, attack your work, question overtly your credentials, talk behind your back and question covertly your sanity, say they did the job in diagonal and didn’t see fraud, so fraud isn’t there, it’s all in your head, you crazy witch, right before they get burned again and skip ship, going to work for the traders, so they can use one of the loopholes in the policies that they know allows for unlimited commissions on pre-existing clients who magically add some random middleman as “facilitator” for managing their files.
This is a complex organization, and the lawyers know the ins and outs of making a cut here and a dent there, 100% legally, with close to zero effort, and recurring deals.
While all of this is happening, the board has no clue, they don’t get the memos, since they get screened out down below, after the input of middle management and legal services, and the senior executive in charge of reporting on risks to the board only reports on risks he knows and understands, which doesn’t include fraud, until another executive starts claiming he too understands the risk, and commits to reporting quarterly to the board on a procedure that would make any person trained in audit roll their eyes, but this other executive has the fire for the matter without the training for the specific risk he’s now taking under, so the board is confused, and everyone still roams freely.
That’s one of the ways governance goes wrong and freely
In the for-profit, highly complex, multi-billion-dollar financial industry.
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Pour aller plus loin, en allant pas loin, et en s'imaginant savoir, pouvoir, faire
Ce qui doit être fait : "All you need is courage!" c'est pas ce que tu disais ?
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Savato Kiriako, se cachant derrière son pseudo, pour faire genre ces histoires sont inventées, le fruit de son imagination, i.e. le produit de ses pensées