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Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

If you assume that most government programs have on the order of a very few % misspending or outright fraud (which is the case, aside from fiascos like the pandemic stimulus payments) then you just have to assume that the real decisions to be made are the "should we have this program at all" or "do rates need to increase / benefits need to decrease". The auditing and details will get worked out by an existing government apparatus designed to ensure this. You cannot let yourself get lost from the bigger picture believing that what is missing is the audit. The big questions are what need to be solved.

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There is no reason to believe government programs are ran efficiently or without large amounts of fraud and corruption. There has to be a reason it costs governments (including government contracts) several times as much to do things compared to the private sector and non-profits.

I didn't say efficiently. I said fraud, which is a different thing.

If you want to attack efficiency, you have a lot of work to deeply change how the government, and in fact many aspects of our public / government works. How they use contractors, the kinds of contracts they're allowed to enter into, the reviews and permitting and public commenting they need to engage in, unions, labor rates, etc. That would be as big a challenge as the above debate.

Maybe I should not have said efficiently, as it really understates it. It's like if someone gets hired to work full time and then only works 20 minutes per week. Is that person committing fraud or just inefficient? What if the person gives part of their salary to their boss to look the other way? What if the person is a company, their boss is a politician, and the money is given to campaign organisation?

I don't know what case you're alluding to or what program that has such examples. But those examples sound like fraud and corruption.

I'm not alluding to a specific case, but I think it's a pretty good analogy for how contracted government projects are run in general (at least in the UK, but I don't see why it would be different elsewhere).

Citizens hold their government to a higher standard. As an analogy, the government can't just go to the hardware store to buy a hammer. It needs to buy a hammer from an American using a drawn out bidding process that preferences veterans and minorities, etc etc. Iterate this for evey little thing.

That isn't fraud or corruption as most folks understand those terms. It is more simply not designing for efficiency. People are more concerned with other factors like fairness transparent process.

More realistically, it needs to buy the hammer from a political donor, a family member or friend of a politician, or some other politically connected person. The hammer will cost many times as much as anyone else would pay for it, and may well be the wrong kind of hammer or otherwise defective, assuming it's delivered at all. If a bidding process is used, the criteria will usually have been designed to favour a predetermined winner.

Is there data on how widespread the phenomenon you are concerned about is?

This isn't building houses, designing drugs, or developing software. It's collecting and distributing money, which the government is fine at.

> There has to be a reason it costs governments (including government contracts) several times as much to do things compared to the private sector and non-profits.

I've dealt with both commercial contracts and government contracts.

Commercial contracts are more lucrative with overhead rates that are truly illegal on govt contracts.

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