[DannyBee]

Sadly, in neither case will you ever have 100% compliance. Pretending it's achievable, and trying to achieve it, is IMHO, silly.

Remember the regulations do not prevent fraud, enforcement prevents fraud. There already exist plenty of things saying it's not okay, etc. Saying "and also, don't do that" is probably not actually necessary most of the time, in the same way saying "don't shoot people" is sufficient. Saying "and also don't shoot them while they are handcuffed" isn't necessary. Crappy post-justification does mean the regulation was written wrong, and changing the regulation to account for the post-justification will not actually improve the process most of the time.

[sliverstorm]

I don't think we can take this much further without knowing what's actually in the regulations, but I imagine they consist more of "officer's dash cam will be run 24/7 and backed up in triplicate", "officer will learn proper gun handling techniques X, Y, & Z", etc rather than "don't shoot people", "don't shoot handcuffed people", "don't shoot clowns", "don't shoot children".

Or, in the fraud case, "books will be audited at frequency X", "Y behavior makes it too easy to hide fraud and is not allowed". Rather than "fraud is illegal on Monday", "fraud is also illegal on Tuesday", "fraud is even illegal on holidays"...

Of course we can never achieve 100% with more regulation, but we make it more of a priority to make abuse harder to get away with than elsewhere, presumably increasing overhead in exchange for lowering abuse (yes, this is probably not a strictly linear curve)

[Bartweiss]

In the travel regulations case, we can see, and horrifyingly it's more of a "fraud is illegal on Monday" situation: https://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/Docs/perdiem/JTR.pdf

There are some sensible regulations there, like having someone approve travel requests, but there are also a lot of very narrow restrictions obviously added by someone who wanted to prevent Fraud X, but lacked the authority to change what was already written. The result is that you get more overhead with depressingly little payoff.

In principle you're right about the trade-off, but that's only the case when rule-writers have the authority to sensibly restructure what already exists.

[Bartweiss]

This is a good summary. At a certain point, you honestly can just have a rule against stupid or malicious behavior. The trick is to enforce it carefully and sensibly, rather than to pursue comprehensive objective rules.

Anyone who's played rules-lawyering games like Nomic will be aware that banning all misbehavior explicitly is impossible. You're basically limited to whitelisting approved behaviors, or implementing a general rule against malfeasance. Unless the consequences of misbehavior are enormous, the second option tends to be more efficient.