Rogue uni IT director pleads guilty after fraudulently buying $2.1M of tech A now-former IT director has pleaded guilty to defrauding the university at which he was employed – and a computer equipment supplier – for $2.1 million over five years. Ronald Simpson, 54, of St Peters, Missouri, pleaded guilty in a US federal court in St Louis to one felony count of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be …
Possibly twenty YEARS in prison for 2.1 million dollars stretched over 5 years, where no one actually got physically hurt, significantly less actual profit was loss, and somebody else really should have been paying attention to the books as well, but you can be in and out in a few months when people DIE due to your deliberate and knowing actions, or get no time or even a trial when billions of dollars are lost and thousands of people's lives are ruined. Or a fine of $250K which hardly seems of equivalent "value" to two decades in prison, in terms of punishment/deterrence/rehabilitation (HAHA! prison being rehabilitation).
No, it's both OR just one. "faces up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, or both". As for it being "up to", yeah, but that's basically the same "up to" that people can get for situations where there are DEATHS involved. Hell, the monetary penalty is a lot more than cases involving death. And the same "up to" in situations where multiple billions of dollars are stolen and thousands of lives are destroyed (when there's even any indictment in those situations, which is rare). There should be no situation where someone like this is even remotely likely to get the same penalty or WORSE than someone who caused the death of another person due to things like negligence or carelessness or greed, or who made massive financial gain at the expense of innocent people and will end up keeping most of that profit in the end.
More perils: in the last couple of days the BBC had a headline "Police shoot man with axe" which is a pretty neat trick.
There are some "combination weapons" that would fit that description ("axe guns"), notionally used for boarding on the high seas. Quite how many were ever used in combat I'm not sure - you only got the one shot before it's just a fancy axe/mace. Probably not standard issue for UK AFOs!
《Computer Unit NT Server followed by an underscore and an integer.》
Obviously someone had an informed opinion of a flagship Microsoft product.
It is just about credible if were are talking NT4 SP6's heyday at the latest. Today of course it would violate so many policies if not all of them. (Uni's typically have more policies than many nations have statutes. Mostly unread.)
In the server room you could honestly say you were surrounded by racks of... as might also be the case in most meetings.
Bet he
a) sent false invoices through the mail (across state borders maybe)
b) e-mailed false invoices/receipts
c) didn’t pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains
Mail fraud
Wire fraud
Tax fraud
Get a count for each and multiply them up per instance and your looking at a lot of jail time for what one might consider very ‘not worth the risk’ crime.
And maybe theft too - of course!
It's amazing how we never hear of the really Machiavellian (Alleged) moves played by senior bean counters.
They also don't like it when some bright spark who understands enough about capex and opex rocks up and starts asking awkward questions.
Questions that began innocently enough.
1) Why did we only spend $36 (Literally thirty six bucks) on new capx Items in the previous 12 months
- The scope of an IT budget (allegedly) supported 400-500 users over 10-11 remote sites.
2) Why did we buy a massively expensive, yet "legacy" PBX at the end of december the year before?
.($600K I believe the story went) for a conveniently distant office with 10 users.
Said users already (allegedly had the same IP phone as everyone else.
Those were powered by an MSP's "cloud" Hosted PBX (ok,Asterisk at their office)
3) This is a doozy, "Someone" got sent to that office a couple of months later to fix a bunch of longstanding problems.
When they walked into the IT closet.. No PBX.
4) Similar problems with UPSes. All the ones in the field were knackered, but allegedly (again) there were something like 50-60 high end APCs out there. Better chance of finding bigfoot.
That would have been around 2010. In the USA.
What happened?, CFO realized he was going to have to report a massive miss in sales targets due to the 2008 housing bubble back to head office in the UK. That would cost him, the CEO and a bunch of other "Senior Folks" (at least) their bonuses - can't have that.
So due to some financial shennanigans instead of taking a massive loss in one year, "Invisible" gear was "purchased" and put on the fixed asset register (CapEx amortization) and the plan was to use depreciation over 7 years to make the problem go away.
Except it didn't, and folks not in on it, but newer staff finding out about it tended to find themselves on the receiving end of a smear campaign and rumors starting about something fishy in It coming from the bean counters. Where's our gear?!
Long story, apologies.
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