| I think it's an integral feature of all organizations that reach a certain size without sufficient level of audits at lower levels. And given enough large organizations, there will be problems. Given the number of large government entities, there's a lot of room for bad oversight. But on top of that there is also often a lot more openness when the auditors does their jobs in government departments and these things are discovered, and even if not, the press often has a lot more access (e.g. freedom of information requirements). In a lot of companies, a lot of borderline behaviour will instead just lead to people getting fired, especially when there is no evidence. A new CTO at a company a friend does work for "decided to part ways" with his company a while back, for example, after migrating a substantial part of their service to a new, totally over-engineered and untested platform that failed spectacularly after they'd very publicly spent a massive amount of money on it. Incompetence or corruption? Probably impossible to prove. And to the public there was no real sign anything was wrong: The launch was highly publicized by the company, and they never told anyone about the negative effects later. Only people with insight into internal sales numbers until they made emergency changes to revert some of his more harmful decisions would know. And for him it likely doesn't even matter that he was effectively fired: He's either a useful fool, or a useful accomplice, for someone who will happily make use of their network to help him land somewhere else. And many potential hirers will only remember the positive press attention prior to the launch and will have no way of knowing about the problems. There are a lot of stories like that in private business too. |