Aerospace Corp Pays $2.5m To Settle Rogue Software Dev Case 129
chrb writes "U.S. company Aerospace Corp. has paid $2.5 million to settle a case that they defrauded the U.S. Air Force by knowingly billing for the services of a rogue software developer. The rogue developer, William Grayson Hunter, was being paid for two full time jobs at two different aerospace companies, but spent most of his time in bars, amusement parks and movie theaters. On some days, he billed his employers for over 24 hours' work."
Creative billing (Score:5, Funny)
"On some days, he billed his employers for over 24 hours work."
Never challenge lawyers at their own game.
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Indeed, if one charges for an hour of one's time at minimum regardless of how long the task takes to complete, and completes 48 /separate/ pieces of billable work for different clients, I'd say that they should certainly bill for 48 hours in a 24 hour day as odd as that might sound. In other words, if you're paying by the rounded hour, get an estimate and save up stuff until you have at least an hours worth of work if you can help it.
Re:Creative billing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Creative billing (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of the best ideas and designs start on napkins. Might have been research/think time.
If I'm solving a problem for a customer in the shower, should I not bill for that time if I'm getting results (especially when I'm holding down two jobs, and my personal time is where I fit my second job)? Granted, I shouldn't be able to bill for all my shower time, but time specifically devoted to a customer, sure, it's legit.
I do some of my best thinking while sleeping (and prepping before going to bed) and usually piece it together in the shower. I just can't get much think time once I'm taking the kids to school or getting interrupted at my day job or in the evening until the kids get to bed.
If I want to write it down while at lunch on a napkin, that's totally billable. Granted, I only do so in quarter hour chunks and I keep accurate time.
Further, there is nothing wrong with double or even triple billing (beyond that, and I think you're going to be kidding yourself at your multitasking skills). Take for instance patching VoIP servers back Cisco CallManagers ran on Windows 2000 and required tons of reboots for the OS, SQL, CCM app, Security Agent, etc. Say I know it is going to take 1 hour to do the patching, and another 15 minutes prior going through my check lists, and 15 minutes post to verify everything is good. So if I have 3 customers that I'm going to patch in one night, so I do it serially or in parallel? I'm going to do it in parallel and triple bill some of that time. I start first pre-patching checklist, then patching. Then I do the second per-patching check-list, and patching. Finally I start the third pre-patching checklist, and patching. Time for a quick bathroom break and then time to start the post-patching check of customer 1, then 2, then 3. Sure, if I run into a snag with one customer I have to pause all the billing for the other customers, but that's on me, and it's also why we have redundant systems.
Yeah, that's how to do it. Customers each get billed 1.5 hours. Takes me 2 hours to do it total, I bill 4.5. Everyone gets what they asked for, I'm efficient with my time, win win.
Now, billing >24 hours in a day, that would take some gravitational time dilation [wikipedia.org], and even then I think it's only on the order of seconds, not hours more per day.
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If I'm solving a problem for a customer in the shower
As a general rule, hours where one is naked should not be considered work time.
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If this were the case then I would be out of a serious amount of money..
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You've clearly never worked from home.
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There's also the possibility that he's a time traveler from the future who just jumped ahead to a time when you can just give jobs like those to super AI androids that look like Bar Rafaeli who will do them in the time it takes for
Re:Creative billing (Score:5, Insightful)
"...There is, of course, the possibility that the man was just a good coder who was handed jobs that were bid as "six months of a full-time programmer" which he then slapped together in an afternoon of wild hacking."
This.
As a mechanic I was paid commission--I got 45% of the labor charge to the customer. Let's use a specific job as an example--4 ball-joints on an S-10 Blazer. An estimating guide (book time) is used by most shops to estimate costs for customers as well as billing. Michell guide puts this job at 6.0 hours. That is what the customer is charged, simple as that--6 hours at the going shop rate.
Now here is where I come in. Since I have done this particular job many, many times, I know exactly what tools to take out of my tool box and set up on a cart. I know exactly what order to do things in, used multiple air hoses so I didn't waste time swapping out air tools, etc. I can actually do this 6 hour job in just over an hour. So I get paid for 45% of 6 hours labor for doing one hour of labor. Sounds like I'm ripping people off, right? Wrong, and here is why.
If I rush that job and fuck it up for any reason, I have to do it OVER FOR FREE. I do not make money doing things over, so I have incentive to do it right the first time. The guy that is paid hourly has no reason to care--he might get fired eventually, but he'll get paid even for doing it again as long as he is on the clock. I got paid really well for my time because I kicked some ass, learned my trade and performed not just well, but well beyond what was expected--I was able to do the job so efficiently that it literally took me 1/6th of the time to do it. I should get paid less for that? Trust me, this is a rare example of that kind of efficiency--most of the time I roughly matched book times on most jobs. If it was a particularly big job (head gasket, tranny rebuild, etc), I would actually exceed the book times by quite a bit--it was a safe bet to be extra careful as rebuilding a transmission twice and only getting paid once sucks. Some jobs were quick and well paying, some were slow and not-so-good paying. They balanced out.
The point is that I was paid to do a specific job, not to be on the fucking clock. As long as the job gets done, why should it matter if I'm in a bar scribbling notes on napkins?
I think the issue here is that dude was entirely dishonest in almost every way he could have been. But other then that, did the guy actually do what he was paid to do?
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I can actually do this 6 hour job in just over an hour.
Another way of saying that is that the average mechanic stretches out a 1 hour job for 6 hours.
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"Another way of saying that is that the average mechanic stretches out a 1 hour job for 6 hours."
I'll take that as a suggestion that I am not average. Thanks.
To be honest, that job was a bad example. I purchased tools that made that job quicker, as well as made a couple of my own. In short, I invested my own cash into making that job quicker. I also failed to mention those -45F days that I didn't touch a single car or make a single penny--I once went an entire week in the shop and didn't touch a single car,
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I can actually do this 6 hour job in just over an hour.
Another way of saying that is that the average mechanic stretches out a 1 hour job for 6 hours.
No, it's another way of saying that the average mechanic takes six hours, and people who are really experienced (and have specialized tools [slashdot.org]) can do it in one.
This isn't really any different than having multiple pay grades for different levels of capability in, say, programming. Sure, the new guy can do it in a week, what with all the testing because of little mistakes that he can easily fix once they show up, among other things. The seasoned hand, who's seen this problem before, and has his own specialize
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This is a perfect example of why the savings are never passed on to the customer.
--Jeremy
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The generally accepted way of doing this is to charge for piecework, not hours. I regularly accomplish many hundred pieces of work estimated at a half-hour each in a day, and then hire in most of the execution piece. By managing smartly my team to handle the tedious bulk I can leverage my expertise and experience more efficiently this way. By organizing the work so that each worker can execute several pieces at a time efficiency is obtained and the impacts of overhead are diminished (meetings, training,
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There are a couple flaws with your logic.
I'll hit the easy one first. The automotive example. The parts and labor manual specifies how long a job *should* take. That's an average skill mechanic, on an average job. Sure, everything may turn out great, and he finishes a 3 hour job in 1 hour. More than likely, the job will take 2.75 to 3.5 hours. The shop facilitates the job according to various things, including their work load. If the book says 0.25 hours to change the
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"engage" "sancrosanct" "leverage" "lagniappe" "go the extra mile" "initiative" "adapt to changing needs in the field."
Not sure if serious.
Not to disrespect your work, but having experience in the automotive industry, if the factory quotes 3 hours for a job, it means that doing it right will probably take 4. If the mechanics accomplish the job in 1, the first question out of my mouth will be "What corners did you cut?"
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Would you feel better if they changed the word hour to charge units? as in the job will cost you 6 charge units?
Since you expect the fast mechanic to charge you less hours, will you happily fork over for 8 hours if you get the slow mechanic?
Of course, 1 hour or 8, if the job isn't actually done at all, you're perfectly right to complain.
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I've looked over your resume here. So tell me about your previous job.
"It was a real dream job."
What was your reason for leaving?
"Sometimes it felt like I put in two days of work just for one."
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Oh that's easy, I've billed a 40 hour day before.
First 10 hours was at my desk in New Zealand, then I was put on an overnight flight to LA and billed 17 hours traveling time. Because I traveled back over the date line, I arrived before I had left. Then when I landed I spent 13 hours fixing the machine that broke on the way. Tada, 40 hours worked on Friday.
First Post (Score:5, Funny)
People need to be at their desk, putting in an honest 8 hours trying to get First Post.
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Try harder. :-P
Re:First Post (Score:4, Funny)
Try harder. :-P
Why? We're still going to bill the DoD for a First Post.
Wow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing I don't get is that the federal government normally requires defense contractors and the like to keep very, very close track of what employees do and to which programs they bill their time, down to the decimalized hour, essentially six-minute intervals. Technically an employee is supposed to charge time to go to the bathroom back to the company itself instead of to a particular program. The whole point of such an asinine system is to keep this kind of fraud from being possible, and to attempt to keep employees working on a particular project on-task.
I guess that the "system worked" in that they did eventually catch on to the fraud, and took some kind of action because of it. I would actually blame the companies much more than the individual himself, though he does have plenty of culpability. I don't see how the employee's actions could have gone unnoticed by the companies.
and where do they bill the 30+ min week timekeepin (Score:3)
and where do they bill the 30+ min week timekeeping time to? it is part of the project right? as the project needs that much time keeping vs say just a basic time clock.
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Yeah, a while back they changed our timekeeping application from an in-house web-app that was simple, fast and just worked to a PeopleSoft monstrosity. It was less capable (wouldn't remember descriptions of project numbers) and required you to wait 3-30 seconds after entering each field, and would occasionally time-out during this interval clearing everything you had entered. One particularly bad week I spent over two hours attempting to enter my time before giving up and faxing it to Payroll. They were not
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That is only for CMMI level 5
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry, what planet are you on?
Here at MCCHORD AFB (now Joint Base Lewis-McChord), our Desk Top PC maintenance is contracted. At one time it was General Dynamics, but now I'm not sure who it is.
The *Main Dude* in charge of IT for the [ Group Name Deleted ] is a big fat dude who spends most of the day drinking in his car. True, he's got a bunch of twenty-somethings doing the work he should be doing, but GOOD FUCKING GRIEF.
One of his geeks is this gimpy dude who can install a printer, but takes a fucking HOUR.
The other dude is openly stealing software / hardware and will sell you something if you need it.
Did I mention these three jokers have SIPRNET access?
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Yeah, but I bet their status updates are flawless.
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By "Install a printer", do you mean, unbox the printer, remove all of the packaging material from it, hook it up to power and Ethernet, assign it an IP address or whatever other possible network protocol setup is required, add entries in a print server if used, and then adding it to one or more workstations, or do you just mean adding the printer queue to a workstation?
If the former, I can actually understand an hour, especially on big ones like HP Color LaserJet 4700s, but if the latter, then it should ta
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It's numbnuts like this that have to call and complain because he doesn't understand what 'Set as default...' means. Thankfully GPO solves most of this retards problems before its even a problem. That's where that hour went buddy.
Re:Wow... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although no one ever said so explicitly, I assume that the bizarre legal status of the Aerospace Corporation was to allow it to operate free from the constraints that govern civil service employees and profit-making defense contractors. Furthermore, the fact that the Aerospace Corp. was privy to so many highly-sensitive programs made it seem natural that no one knew what anyone else was doing--even it the employee was doing nothing.
Re:Wow... (Score:4, Informative)
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*Within* the public service, he'd be promoted instead.
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I once had a Section Manager who came up with a "cook book" of hours each employee should charge to each of the various project numbers regardless of what they were actually working on in order for the Section he managed (several hundred employees) to always balance its budget exactly.
Sounds like he was dropping a hint that maybe you ought to be working on the assigned projects to fulfill the billing requirements, instead of whatever shit you were actually working on. Instead, you worked on something else
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Thing I don't get is that the federal government normally requires defense contractors and the like to keep very, very close track of what employees do and to which programs they bill their time, down to the decimalized hour, essentially six-minute intervals. Technically an employee is supposed to charge time to go to the bathroom back to the company itself instead of to a particular program. The whole point of such an asinine system is to keep this kind of fraud from being possible, and to attempt to keep employees working on a particular project on-task.
The point of the system is to make sure the pork money ends up in the right place, ie. the boss's pocket.
24 hours of work per day is possible (Score:5, Funny)
Keep in mind that people have dual-core brains, so if they parallelize their tasks properly they can work as many as 48 hours in a day. (I don't recommend overclocking though, speed kills)
Re:24 hours of work per day is possible (Score:5, Funny)
Nice gig if you can get it (Score:2)
\subject
Rogue developer?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like there was no development involved. If an accountant steals money by cooking the books, he's not a 'rogue accountant'. He's an embezzler.
This guy is a fraud and a cheat. Nothing rogue about him.
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The company didn't care, because they billed the government more than they paid him, so for every hour he 'worked' but did nothing, they made money.
Sad thing is the guy died of natural causes during the investigation. It's a good way to spend your last few years, I guess.
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You don't understand. It's a different crime when it has something to do with computers. That's why we need all these computer crime laws!
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And if that 'rogue accountant' has higher ups that are accomplices, then the accountant is not rogue -- it's the contracting company which is. Hopefully, some of the people in that company will go to jail for fraud too.
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Depends. If he did get both of his jobs done in the 2 hours he worked, than why shouldn't he get payed? If he didn't, how in hell did he manage it without anyone noticing?
A good start... (Score:5, Insightful)
An organization that had no problems charging the Air Force for 'work' done by someone that they knew was simply an empty desk shows an absolute disregard for the taxpayers and the brave men and women in the military who serve to protect the US by putting themselves in harm's way. IMO this company got off easy when they should have faced the corporate death penalty.
or we can move the work in house and cut the overh (Score:3)
or we can move the work in house and cut the overhead + have more control over the work.
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Sure because govt salaries always draw the best talent right?! I'm a contractor and I live pretty frugally but if I were on a govt salary I'd have to live in a cardboard box. Cost of living anywhere in the DC area makes the GS scale a joke. If the pay scale were reasonable I'd consider it but not with my skills and their pay scale right now.... Moving skilled work in house simply ensures it will be done poorly IMO.
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Even selling weapons to Iran and a terrorist group that has recently killed 241 American servicemen is the mark of a true patriot.
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Bobby Fischer wasn't charged with treason, and he wasn't charged for playing Russians. He was charged for violating sanctions against Yugoslavia.
Treason is defined in the US Constitution, and while it might cover Fischer's actions, it'd be more than a bit of a stretch. It certainly doesn't cover stealing from the government in ordinary ways. Nor does it cover selling arms to Eastasia when the current enemy is Eurasia, even if Eastasia was the enemy la
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Anyway, my response was about throwing the "treason" word around and not about actual convictions because it's pretty obvious that the current circumstances don't even come close. Lo
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Or they could just switch to fixed-firm contracts.
That will hardly ever happen (Score:2)
What would really help is making the USA government transparent and politicians accountable for all the money spent. Roughly half of the USA tax money is going to black
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Every government spends every dollar (or whatever currency unit they reap in taxes) they get and then some - if those 2 million hadn't been spent on that idiot, do you honestly think they would have been put into a kind of piggybank?
It would have been spent on some other useless shit, no doubt.
It's the same everywhere - even large corporations suffer from this.
What's rogue about him? (Score:1)
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Re:What's rogue about him? (Score:5, Funny)
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don't cry to me about 26 hour days.
well, in my time, we had to get to work half an hour before we got home.
and we were *happy* to do it.
damned straight.
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Change that to was. He's apparently dead now.
Did they catch him when some kind of automated billing script kept on kicking without him? And if so, how long did it take for them to connect the dots?
Time Travel (Score:1)
Once upon a time I billed 27 hours in a day because I was traveling across the world staying in the same day. ( We were always told that all times were "local" ). The system accepted the time and no one in the approver list ever questioned it.
where does time zones fall in billing like any way (Score:2)
As that has to be some kind of rule some where to even it out.
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Thank Goodness! (Score:3)
Tin foil hats (Score:1)
---Aerospace Corp. oversees many of the nation's most classified programs.
---Hunter died in August 2010 of natural causes while under criminal investigation, Daniels said. He was 56.
---The company said it discovered the fraud in 2008 when a third company inquired about Hunter's security clearance.
Natural causes at 56 while living nicely? Oh ya?
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In addition to submitting fraudulent time cards, Hunter falsely claimed to hold a doctorate from Oxford University in England when he had only a high school education
I seriously doubt of any foul play on his death, but he sure was very odd fellow.
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For someone who lives in bars, 56 seems to be a quite average natural life span.
Overbilling? Install SAP (Score:4, Informative)
A former client of mine (Fortune 500) is using SAP for the timesheets, and it's not possible to save the timesheet if there is more or less than exactly 8 hours billed in a day. Hugely convenient, unless someone is interested by reality.
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Sounds easy enough to circumvent. Oh, look, we have two employees working that job 8 hours a day for a total of 16 hours a day between the two of them ... and they happen to be the same person registered to different employee numbers.
You have a long way to go before you can become a master embezzler... (might not be a bad thing!)
Rogue Developer? (Score:2)
They should have known better... I don't think anyone's done any development on Rogue [wikipedia.org] in years, or even decades. Maybe if he was a Nethack developer he might have gotten away with it...
Sophisticated Methods (Score:5, Insightful)
"This person was hired before we had sophisticated methods to verify international degrees," Aerospace spokeswoman Pamela Keeton said in a statement. "He failed to disclose his other employment as required."
Sophisticated methods...like calling them and asking.
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Apparently, an international phone call is more expensive than paying a salary to an unqualified employee...
His degree was from OXFORD (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, his company could have called - if they had someone who knew how to speak BRITISH.
Language barriers allow these sorts of things to go unnoticed for years.
I used to work at Aerospace (Score:4, Interesting)
The Aerospace Corporation is a great place to work if you are good at what you do and you love your job. You are given responsibility and are expected, without indoctrination, to be honest, true to the projects you work on, to the company's customers, your managers and your co-workers. The company is set up as a not-for-profit and it does not manufacture or compete, placing it in the position that it can be let in to what may be private and proprietary among competing defense contractors because Aerospace represents the interests of the government (the customer). It is inexcusable that the government was overcharged. Though I do not know the circumstances of this overcharge, I can tell you that there are projects the customer sets up where oversight can be artificially limited. Highly classified projects may give access to an extremely small number of people. I've experienced where my boss had no clue what I was doing on a project. The annual review went something like this...
Boss: So, how have you been doing?
Me: Great!
Boss: I asked and they said you're OK. I asked if they wanted to change you out. They said no.
Me: (annoyed) Thanks for sharing, got to get back to it.
Boss: Good meeting.
My boss could not know what I was working on due to customer imposed constraint. I did my job well, he believed me, and you, dear taxpayer, got more than your money's worth. Could I have abused the system? My thoughts never went there at the time, but looking back on it, it could have taken a couple of years for someone to be administratively allowed to take my place so, yeah, it was possible. I never learned of this happening, there certainly was no culture to support such behavior, and since we were, in essence, protecting ourselves by protecting you, it was not in our best interests to shortchange any project.
Aerospace holds others and itself to the highest levels of expectation. Someone who has passed extensive government background check is, by definition, trustworthy. Even if they were duped they are responsible. They've done the responsible thing, have demonstrated they are not above the rules, will figure out ways to not be duped like this again, and can go back to making certain we continue to be safe and that our tax dollars are spent more effectively.
Re:I used to work at Aerospace (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. I never worked for Arerospace Corp, but when I was doing military projects I had the same surreal experience. My boss didn't have a "need to know", so he just went by whatever the program office said. Since it was R&D type work the program office didn't really know how long things should take. And I worked in a vault, so it wasn't like someone could have stumbled in and caught me sleeping. I could probably have gotten away with working one day out of three.
But I didn't abuse it either. If you're on the right project your work amounts to a really cool hobby for which someone else is picking up the enormous tab.
Similar story in our pharmacies (Score:2)
he's in the wrong line of work (Score:1)
he sounds like the perfect bank executive.
He wasn't a software developer (Score:4, Informative)
Mr. Hunter wasn't a software developer. He was a software quality assurance guy.
Interesting line... (Score:2)
Quick, somebody find my tin-foil hat!
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He died young indeed but when you live 48 hours per day; what do you expect?
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I wouldn't call either a gunshot or gaping hole "natural causes."
Good for him (Score:3)
"He allegedly ran the scheme from 2003 until 2008... Hunter died in August 2010 of natural causes while under criminal investigation, Daniels said. He was 56."
He was having fun while he could. We should all take note as we might not be around tomorrow.