Folly of the DayHe Applied for 2,071 NHS Jobs, Invented an Oxford Master's to Win Thirteen of Them, and Then Went on Sick Leave Almost the Moment He Arrived
Two thousand and seventy-one applications is not fraud, it is a career, and it is very nearly an honest one — the labour of composing, submitting and lying that many times exceeds the labour of simply acquiring the qualifications he claimed. That is the discovery here, and it is not about him. Modern institutions no longer hire people; they hire documents about people, and a document is a far easier thing to counterfeit than a competence. He understood this better than the thirteen boards that appointed him, which is why he kept being appointed. Note the final elegance: having won the post he immediately vanished into sick leave, because the post was never the point. He wanted the title, and the title turns out to be entirely separable from the work — a fact every senior manager suspects and only a criminal has the nerve to prove.
Source: NHS Counter Fraud Authority
The WireCouncil Manager Broke Wind on a Younger Colleague Eating His Lunch, Told Him He Could Get Rid of Him, and Has Now Been Found Guilty of Age Discrimination
The threat is the tell, not the flatulence. A man secure in his position does not need to announce that he has disposed of people before; he simply does his job and lets the record speak. What the tribunal actually documented is the ancient terror of the competent junior — the arrival of somebody younger, hungrier and plainly better, and the discovery that one's only remaining advantage is the power to make his lunch unpleasant. Seniority, in the end, is not a store of authority but a store of grievance, and this is what a man spends it on.
Source: Personnel Today
The WireHe Told His Insurers He Was the Sole Signatory on the Client Account. He Was Not. Then His Firm's Cover Lapsed and He Simply Kept Practising
Insurance is the profession's confession that its members are fallible; to lie in order to obtain it is to claim an exemption from the very fallibility the policy exists to cover. Then the cover lapsed, and there was a door marked orderly closure standing open, and he walked past it and carried on taking clients — clients who did not know that the safety net beneath their affairs had been quietly rolled up and put away. That is the arrogance worth naming. Not the lie on the form, which is ordinary, but the two years afterwards spent trading on a protection he knew did not exist, on the private conviction that nothing he touched would ever go wrong.
Source: Law Society Gazette
The WireA Scaffold Tower Fell Over on a Busy High Street and Injured Two Passers-By. The Director Responsible Was Fined £1,730.
Every regulation of this kind is a sentence written in someone else's blood, and the whole point of a limited company is to stand between a man and the consequences of ignoring one. The arithmetic is the argument: two strangers walking down a high street were seriously hurt, and the individual who was legally required to prevent it will pay less than the cost of the scaffolding. We have not abolished responsibility, we have merely priced it, and at that price it is cheaper to be careless than to be careful.
Source: HSE Media Centre
The WireThe Regulator Shut the Firm Down Because Its Principal Had Already Been Struck Off
Notice the sequence. The striking-off came first; the closing of the firm came afterwards, as a separate administrative act requiring an agent, a van and a stranger's hands on other people's private papers. A profession that must be told, in writing, that a man it has just expelled should also stop practising has learned something disagreeable about its members — namely that being disqualified and being deterred are two entirely different things.
Source: Law Society Gazette
Black-Robed EgomaniaA Federal Appeals Judge Parked Across Three Spaces. When a Man Objected, He Swiped the Glasses Off His Face, Threw Them Across the Car Park and Stomped on Them.
The parking is the whole case. A man who takes three spaces has already published his theory of the world — that the ordinary allocation of shared things does not apply to him — and everything that followed was merely that theory being defended in the field. Consider what it means that an appellate judge, whose entire professional existence consists of reviewing other people's failures of self-command from a great height and in calm prose, could not manage twenty seconds of it over a rectangle of painted tarmac. The robe does not confer the judgement. It only conceals how little of it there was.
Source: Reason / The Volokh Conspiracy
LazyTownThe Tachograph Had Not Been Downloaded in 706 Days. The Lorry Was Carrying Another Company's Licence Discs. The Director Said They Had Been Left in the Vehicle by Mistake.
Seven hundred and six days is not an oversight; it is a policy, arrived at by never once deciding anything. Downloading a tachograph takes minutes and requires a man to walk to a vehicle holding a small device, which is precisely why it was never done — the task was too small to schedule and too dull to remember, and so it compounded, silently, for very nearly two years. And the discs belonging to a national logistics firm sat in the windscreen the whole time, announcing to every passing officer that nobody in the business had ever looked at the front of their own lorry.
Source: trans.INFO