September 13, 2026 — Medicare Paid $380 Million Over Six Years for Organs That Went Into…

Folly of the Day

Medicare Paid $380 Million Over Six Years for Organs That Went Into Nobody. Its Own Guidance Told the Hospitals to Send the Bill.

The state wrote a rule, then wrote an instruction contradicting the rule, then paid out on the instruction for six years while the rule sat in the statute book being correct — and the lesson is not that anyone stole anything, but that a bureaucracy large enough stops being able to hear itself, so that its left hand can spend $380 million obeying its right hand in direct defiance of the law both hands exist to administer.

Source: HHS Office of Inspector General, Report OAS-25-07-124

The Wire

A Man Searched for 'Help With Gambling'. The Advert He Got Back Offered Fast Signups and Mega Bonuses.

Every safeguard the company described was real, documented, and produced in evidence — which is precisely the point, because the modern apparatus of compliance is not built to prevent the harm, it is built to prove afterwards that you had a system, and a system is a thing you can show a regulator while the machine underneath it goes on selling roulette to a man trying to stop.

Source: Advertising Standards Authority

The Wire

He Told the Bank His Recruitment Firm Turned Over £200,000 in 2019. It Had Not Traded Since 2018. He Then Moved £46,760 of the £50,000 to Himself.

The scheme required him to state a turnover figure that the Government could check against records the Government already held, which he did, in writing, on a form — and the abiding mystery of the Bounce Back years is not that men were dishonest but that so many of them were dishonest in the one direction where the evidence of it was being filed, dated and countersigned by the victim.

Source: Lancashire Telegraph / Insolvency Service

The Wire

They Imported 350,000 Vapes Labelled as Medical Nebulisers. Border Force Opened the Box.

A nebuliser and a disposable vape are both plastic tubes that make a mist, and somewhere in that resemblance two people talked themselves into believing a customs officer would see a pallet of 350,000 of them and think: asthma clinic — the recurring discovery of the confident being that the lie which satisfies the liar has never once been asked to satisfy anybody else.

Source: GOV.UK / Insolvency Service

The Wire

He Took £100,000 in Emergency Pandemic Loans and Bought a Flat in Turkey, a Second-Hand Peugeot and an £800 Pizza Oven.

The flat abroad is at least the recognisable shape of an ambition, but the pizza oven is the detail that gives the whole genre away: this was never a plan to get rich and disappear, it was a man treating a national emergency as a windfall and spending it exactly as he would have spent a lottery win, which is why the state found every item and why he is now buying all of it a second time.

Source: GOV.UK / Insolvency Service

The Wire

An Advocate Shouted at a Sessions Judge and Was Facing Criminal Contempt. He Apologised, and the High Court Sentenced Him to a Thousand Fruit Trees.

There is a lovely proportion in it — a thousand rupees for the offence to the court's dignity and a thousand trees for everybody else — and it is worth noting that the only sanction here with any prospect of outlasting the man who earned it is the orchard, which is more than can be said for most professional discipline anywhere.

Source: LiveLaw (India)

The Wire

Norfolk Hired Consultants on a Contract Worth Up to £6.3 Million to Abolish Its Eight Councils. The Abolition Has Been Called Off. The Councils Are Still There.

Nothing was built, nothing was abolished and nothing was reformed, yet a great deal of money has irreversibly changed hands — which is the characteristic product of modern administration, an expensive and fully documented account of a thing that did not occur.

Source: Thetford & Brandon Times

The Wire

Seventeen People Paid £97,249 for Whisky Casks. Four of Them Owned a Cask. Some of the Certificates Named a Company That Did Not Exist.

The pitch works because a cask of maturing whisky is the perfect object for the credulous — it is supposed to sit in a warehouse in Scotland for a decade doing nothing while it makes you richer, which means the one thing no buyer will ever do is go and look at it, and a man who has decided not to look has not been defrauded so much as he has quietly commissioned the fraud himself.

Source: GOV.UK / Insolvency Service

Black-Robed Egomania

She Recused Herself From the Case. Then She Went On Issuing Orders In It.

Recusal is the one act in which a judge formally concedes that her own judgment is the problem — and to perform that concession and then carry on deciding the case regardless is to treat the admission of unfitness as a mere procedural courtesy owed to the file rather than a limit that could ever apply to the person holding the pen.

Source: The Ethics Reporter / Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct (CJC No. 13555-F-219)

LazyTown

She Signed Off the Safety Checks in Advance. The Checks Had Not Happened Yet.

The walk-round she declined to take would have cost her a few minutes and no thought whatever; the paperwork certifying that she had taken it cost her the job — laziness at this pitch is not the avoidance of work but a positive preference for the harder and more damning labour of pretending.

Source: Human Resources Director (Australia) / Fair Work Commission

Campus Watch

An MIT Committee Reports That a Machine Can Now Credibly Complete Almost Any Written Assignment It Sets. Its Conclusion Is That the Curriculum Should Move Faster.

An institution has just certified in writing that the work by which it measures its students can be done without a student, and has treated this as a scheduling problem — which is the most expensive way yet devised of not asking whether the assignments were measuring anything in the first place.

Source: Higher Ed Dive / MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI in Teaching, Learning and Research