Discussion: New job

Are you now working AND going to grad school?

Yes! I started on May 24th -- and I only have one class this summer, so it seems manageable "so far".

I hadn't planned to look for anything new until later this summer (when my severance will be running out), but this opportunity appeared and sounded too good to pass up: working on a team that uses data & analytics to identify fraud / waste / abuse in recipients of pandemic funds (PPP loans, grants, anything from CARES Act and related legislation).

It pays literally half of what my old job paid (it's a position that was targeted at undergrad and grad students), but it's flexible / part-time, work-from-home, degree-relevant, and (so far) very interesting with GREAT bosses & co-workers. :-)

That sounds like a great job in that it will ferret out the fraudsters. I have thought all along that so much of that money went to the wrong people. And the people who really needed it were left with little to nothing.

Good luck!!

Kris, it was encouraging to me to learn that every major federal department (e.g., Transportation, Justice, Education, Interior, etc.) has an Inspector General team focused on pandemic fraud -- and that this will be a five-year initiative starting from 2020.

My experience with the Cares Act has been in funds that our local school was able to access, and it has been a lifesaver, certainly financially and perhaps regarding mortality (none so far).

We've used it to upgrade the HVAC systems for much better ventilation, PPE, a huge amount of technology (both hardware and software). There are pretty strict rules, and a lot of effort to make sure we follow them, because you don't want any claims for reimbursement to be rejected.

There has also been, of course, an effort to identify every possible expense that fits within the rules. All valid in our eyes, but I suppose waste in someone else's? Similar to the old adage, one man's trash is another's treasure.

CARES was just the first Easter bunny to come along. Since then there have been ESSER I, ESSER II, and ESSER III, all parts of larger legislation, the ESSERs focussed on aid to elementary and secondary schools. Valid over a longer timeframe than CARES. Again, a lifesaver.

15 months ago I thought we were heading for a financial disaster. Now things seem to be on solid footing. Never expected it.

That's all very encouraging to hear, both about the Inspectors General and helping out the schools. Perhaps I just need to be a little more optimistic. :-)

No, I think there's a lot shenanigans going on, a lot of favoritism in the doling out of PPP money.

Less so in our stuff, I think, because the basic allocations are based on population, not based on who you know, or whether your bank processes your application first or last, or whether you are just making everything up.

There's still a lot of the money from the Rescue Act that they are still figuring out the rules for. So we (the town in this case) have a rough idea of what's might be coming our way, but little idea of exactly what we can spend it on.

Another way to look at funds that may have been objectively misspent or misdirected or in some way even outright an abusive expenditure is that if it helped keep the economy from going into some kind of very deep, protracted recession/depression--as certainly was possible and perhaps even seemed probable a year ago--then that alone was/is a real good thing.

Locally, if I have the facts generally right, the governor allocated a couple of million CARES dollars to UW so it could buy a professional building from the investor group that owned it, almost as if the CARES money was some kind of a discretionary slush fund. The building will remain leased out to the current tenants for the time being, and UW has identified it as meeting some projected long term need or plan that may or may not come to fruition. A valid use of the funds? I don't know, and it looked odd--or so I thought--but in the end it meant a few more million dollars that will end up in the economy.