Yale employee admits she stole $40M in electronics from the university | Hacker News Reader

Yale employee admits she stole $40M in electronics from the university

npr.org

45 pointslatchkey21 comments

The perfect example for how bloated, inefficient, and wasteful the bureaucracies of higher education can become.

How did $40m of fraudulent spending go unchecked for literally years? It seems to be that even at the largest private sector organizations this kind of malfeasance would have been caught much sooner.

Yale is a private sector organization.

Yale, like much of US higher ed, is even more dependent on Federal spending and government tax breaks than ostensibly private firms like Lockheed Martin or Raytheon, who make products that only the government can buy.

It's not like it's Choate or Groton or St. George's highschool, where tuition and gifts need to cover expenses (and are still tax-free).

Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Yale are all private sector organizations. Being largely dependent on government spending and tax breaks does not make you a public sector organization.

Being largely dependent on government spending and tax breaks does not make you a public sector organization.

True in only the most reductive and naive sense; but this is the sort of mistake that ostensibly private orgs like the ones above count on, in order to avoid the kind of scrutiny & accountability that an explicitly public agency must endure.

If by reductive and naive sense you mean by the actual definition of private vs public sector.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck....

Beyond a certain limit (~50 employees), the left hand loses track of the right hand. This is and will be the status quo, unless we legislate limits on corporations from growing too big. In other words, this is unlikely to change, because such limits should also be applied to government.

Yeah, no. Companies that care about costs absolutely track what they’re spending and where. I’ve seen plenty of merely questionable expenses a fraction of this caught and called out at very large companies.

Indeed, but that's also true for any large organization, whatever their status: public, private, nonprofit.

I witnessed large sums being spent for very dubious reasons in private firms, mainly in order to meet ridiculous demands by executives. Show-off features despite no interest from customers, "visionary product" e.g. implementing a blockchain or "artificial intelligence" that classic algorithms could do as well for much cheaper.

The idea that private entities pay more attention to money than public entities is a prejudice. At least in modern developed democracies.

Financial scandals in private firms tend to be muted in order to preserve the external reputation: hence the impression that public entities are less careful.

It's all the same everywhere, no general rule in that matter.

Both can be true. Companies will question every little nickel and dime certain employees spend and then have big stupid horrible blind spots in other places. Happens all the time. I was a PhD student at Yale and they were extremely touchy about certain kinds of spending, and then would also do stupid stuff like this.

Google and Facebook's accounting departments fell for forged invoices worth over $100m. [1]

Yale is far from an outlier.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/business/facebook-google-...

title of the article

"tried"

Try reading the article, he received well over $50m.

The 3rd gen iPad was released 2012 ($499), air 2013 ($499), mini 4 2015 ($399), pro 2015 ($799), pro 3rd gen 2018 ($799-$999), you get the idea. If we take an higher end average (assuming she got more bold over time) and use $999 for the average (keeping in mind that she also bought Surface Pros) that's roughly 40,000 pieces of equipment she stole.

2013-2021 is 8 years. That's an average of 5,000 per year or roughly 100 per week.

Wild.

It wasn't like they had the equipment and she was stealing it. She was deliberately ordering equipment and shipping it to another company for profit.

That's just my point- that's still a ton. (It'd be even more impressive if it wasn't all new purchases.)

At this scale its more likely she had an accomplice pretending to sell this hardware to Yale for %.

[dupe]

More discussion over here from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30849862

This is a different article from NPR; the other link is to MarketWatch. More discussion and perspectives can be a good thing.

Yale has a lot of problems hiring qualified administrators because of its location. It’s really hard to convince people to move to New Haven.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com