SlouchyGuy t1_jdhbimg wrote on March 24, 2023 at 12:11 PM

Reply to comment by cowvin in South Carolina's comptroller quits after a $3.5 billion accounting error by kangarooturd

I wonder if it's the usual story of juniors doing the job, giving the report to senior people who never bother to check or control anything

gopms t1_jdj6rad wrote on March 24, 2023 at 7:44 PM

It is! I worked at a university and wasn't particularly experienced with accounting and finance but it was part of my new job. I read over all of the rules and guidelines and ran every report so I could get a handle on what was going on and found a glaring anomaly in the accounts when I went to reconcile them at the end of my first month. Money wasn't missing, there was basically a pot of money that hadn't been touched because no one seemed to know it was there and it had no oversight whatsoever. I pointed this out to the bigwigs in finance and they wouldn't believe me. I literally pointed to it on the finance report and they still wouldn't believe me. Multiple times I showed it to them. I used the money over the next couple of years to fund things that should have been funded but weren't and someone finally said "hey gopms where do you find the money for these things?" Me: "That pot of money I told you about multiple times!" They still didn't believe me! 5 years of me pulling rabbits out of hats to pay for things and finally someone said "no really, where is she getting the money from?" They were lucky that I was not stealing it from them

TheOldGuy59 t1_jdvbg90 wrote on March 27, 2023 at 1:49 PM

I would have escalated this and continued to escalate this as far as I could so that it would never have come back down - shit rolls downhill. I'm assuming you have detailed documentation of every conversation you had with the Wigs to prove you told them? They love to ignore shit until something bad happens, then they look for scapegoats so they don't take the heat for their sloth. If you're not doing that I suggest you start doing it, CYA. I work for a major corporate conglomerate and you'd better believe I do it every single day. The crap I find all the time out there that would mean being terminated and blackballed if it was ever blamed on me is staggering, but execs and managers just get transferred to a new section so they can screw that one up too - the Good Old Boys Club in action.

I won't tell you where I work but I will tell you I'll never fly on an airplane ever again. I've seen the decisions made around here by execs who don't understand anything about what's going on and I don't trust that the same decisions are being made about aircraft components. You couldn't pay me enough to fly anymore.

djdefekt t1_jdhhz4v wrote on March 24, 2023 at 1:06 PM

If you rtfa a junior found the error and was the whistle blower

SponConSerdTent t1_jdiaul6 wrote on March 24, 2023 at 4:20 PM

If you drtfa, the real accounting errors were the redditors we met along the way

omgFWTbear t1_jdich4o wrote on March 24, 2023 at 4:31 PM

Given my experience closely adjacent to similar things elsewhere, I think there are predictable questions of management from the top quashing corrections (which is separate from the article’s text that states the error began and end with the executive) and people fearing for their jobs not whistleblowing or just following orders.