Several issues here:
[1] I'm assuming 'fraud' can de defined in a common-sense way. But bear in mind that a society may 'need' or have to tolerate fraud, for example to keep full employment, or as an outlet for anti-social people, or because it may be impractical to remove it.
[2] I'm assuming a traditional set of hierarchies, so that fraud will appear differently to the different layers. For example, ordinary soldiers, or factory workers, or teachers, or victims of wars may be part of a fraud without having any idea that they are. At intermediate layers, ordinary discreditable or dishonest manoeuvres become entangled with fraud - some such behaviour no doubt will happen even in organisations with completely honest purposes. The trick is to try to isolate the science component.
[3] At the highest levels, activities completely out of the range of ordinary people can be carried out, and in fact seem common. We must separate out those activities which don't involve science fraud. The sort of things I have in mind are: military leaders who want a war purely for the sake of their name being linked with their war; legal entanglements which have some undeclared purpose, such as promoting crime or forcing immigration or increasing drug use; arranging entire education systems so that certain topics are censored; issuing misleading information to cause stock/share prices to change; dumping products to ruin smaller industries of smaller countries; using the legal power to print money to damage people who don't have that option; angling for money for some sectors - demolition and building work, roads, weapons.
[4] 'Science fraud' I take to involve money for projects which look scientific, but in fact are insecurely based scientifically. Usually (I think) they are based on secrecy - where the basis for the work is uncheckable; or complexity - and usually care is taken to obfuscate the issues as much as possible; or on the suppression of comparative data - so the projects get money in situations where, if information were more freely available, it would go to other projects. Modern examples include AIDS, much of NASA, organophosphate insecticides and BSE, promotion of some drugs, fluoridation, climate pseudo-science, and no doubt much of physics - including probably particle accelerators, nuclear weapons, and probably nuclear power. A lot of biology is based on poor science (cf. Harold Hillman and others). As these things have picked up money, they have at the same time been able to fund their own publicity and pressure group schemes. In fact they have some advantages over serious science - they can use a high proportion of money purely for propaganda, rather than have to fund serious and uncertain work. And they pick up defenders in the shape of associates and hangers-on whose lives and income make them dependent on fraud.
[5] There is some sort of distinction between the 'private' and 'public' sectors, but the bigger the industry, the fuzzier is the dividing line. Internationally, it becomes even fuzzier.
The point of this section - which could be expanded into a forum - is to try to look at patterns and structures in society and economics, in the hope of trying to avoid future errors, and maximise the chance of dismantling frauds in an efficient way. I'll now post some suggestive material by Ivor Catt, a friend of mine.
____________________________________________________________
The following is edited down from from The Catt Concept (1972; with permission). It's in the pop sociology tradition of Parkinson's Law and The Peter Principle; they looked at the British civil service, and the Canadian and US education systems. Catt's book is unusual in looking at employees in technical work. Note that he is careful to distinguish management from technocracy - as in 'the management-technocracy guerilla war'. His examples are not from the highest levels, as described in [3] above, but people caught in the middle. (NB: Catt is not a nuke sceptic, nor even a NASA sceptic. The experiences below were based on the pre-silicon chip world of computers).
Inverse Firing Order This causes a manager to lay off his best, rather than his worst, man. The reason for this is that in the future there will be a layoff at the manager's level, and a manager is more likely to be laid off if he has a good subordinate who can take his place. We should sympathize with the manager, who suffers much more from a layoff than a younger, more junior man. ... The high-flying recruit must bear this danger in mind and not show too much brilliance during the first year with his new company. ...
The Incompletion Gambit The most secure project is the unsuccessful one, because it lasts the longest. Most layoffs occur at the completion of a project, so that only a fool or a brave man completes one if he is not already embarked on its successor. A wise worker will delay completion of a project and look around for another job during the last month or two. Of course, a project should not be seen to slip in its early stages, when the cost of dropping it would appear small. The best thing to do is to make every effort to make it appear that the project is going well until the last month or two and then let it slip little by little ... [naive material follows on Apollo having been 'too successful']
Secretiveness The employee believes, rightly, that he is less likely to be laid off if there is uncertainty about his functions and how he performs them. This makes him secretive and ambiguous when discussing them. It is difficult for upper management to carry out a study of the way the place actually operates, because this is taken to be a prelude to a layoff. ... The employee strives to convince his managers that they are not fully familiar with the situation. He does this in a number of ways. One useful trick is to bring in new words to replace well-known ones. ... in a dynamic company or industry, everything will be renamed frequently in an attempt to give pause to the hatchet man and so elude him. ...
We have all had the experience of trying to get some understanding (rather than mere information) out of someone who is reluctant to hand it over. ... The important principle is that the less management knows and understands, the more secure the job is.
The Supremacy of the Prosaic Any suggested major improvement in product or technology is primarily a threat to the security and livelihood of one's co-workers. In the reorganization that will be necessary to take advantage of the change, many employees risk being laid off 'in the interests of efficiency'. So all staff should unite to nip in the bud a suggestion which promises more than a marginal improvement in the technology. The best way to defuse the inventive and therefore dangerous talent in the company is to direct it into lines of research which are likely to be unproductive. This is what causes such confusion in meetings where new ideas are being discussed. Support for an idea may be honest and sincere, or it may be offered by someone who wants to lead others off on a wrong track. It is difficult to get sense out of anyone. ...
The Con Game If a manager supports an idea which is unsuccessful, he is fired. (If his boss did not fire him, he himself would be fired for shielding uneconomic, incompetent units of labor.) So he must mislead his boss and make him think that the project is going well, until the investment reaches such a level that the exposure of failure would lead to the firing of his boss rather than himself. When his boss finally finds out, he sets to work to mislead his boss. And so on. By this means, hopeless projects, in which no one believes, receive prolonged financing. ... When a phoney project has grown to large proportions, it is embarrassing to have a bright guy at a low level who can see through it. He may even try to convince the project manager that the project is doomed. The project manager already knows this, but cannot admit it, and will sometimes employ the clever maneuver of trying to fasten some of the blame for failure on to the young upstart. ...
The Domino Theory of Firing The project is going badly, and middle management must prove that it is dynamic and aggressive by firing someone as a scapegoat. The obvious target is the man at a low level who is closely involved with the details of the project. Unfortunately, when he is gone, a great deal of important knowledge about the project has gone with him, so the project gets into greater difficulties. A bigger scapegoat is now required, so his boss is fired. This domino effect has been seen propagating itself upward through five levels of management, the firings taking place at intervals of one month. Each time someone is fired, observers are very satisfied and feel that the unfair dismissal at the lower level has been expiated. ....
Layoff Fodder Management ordains a 10 per cent layoff for every department once a year. This is supposed to get rid of deadwood, keep others on their toes and make them more efficient, and also keep bureaucracies from growing out of hand. How do middle managers react? They know there will be a layoff in the future, which will disrupt their department. So they hire 'layoff fodder', who are kept in reserve to be laid off when upper management demands some pruning. In the New Reality, a well-run department will carry some 15 per cent surplus staff, to provide for any eventuality. The surplus staff is placed in peripheral spots in the organization - technical coordinator, librarian, administrative assistant, advance planning, training officer and equipment supervisor are typical stables for layoff fodder. The important thing is that when upper management demands economies, these people can be offered up without seriously disrupting the organization. ....
Leapfrog C thinks his boss B is going to be fired or laid off. To avoid being washed away with him and to try to get the resulting vacant position when B goes, he must try to withdraw as much as possible from B and leapfrog to B's boss, A. This means that if B is not in fact fired very soon, he in his turn fires C for trying to squeeze him out. The ostensible reason, as always, will be an attack on C's personality. A must support B in firing C; otherwise, B in self-defence must leapfrog A, and try to get on the good side of his boss. To block leapfrog attempts against himself, a dynamic manager interposes himself between his subordinates and the rest of the company. In the extreme case, his subordinates are not allowed to communicate directly with anyone in other departments. ... his subordinates, cut off from the rest of the company, are rendered virtually useless, and the whole department stagnates. ...
Advance Planning Future plans should be grossly optimistic. A man is judged not only on past achievements but on predicted future achievements. Past achievements successfully completed are usually muddied by hiatuses of layoffs, firings, changes of plan and intergroup conflicts. So in general all there is to go on in judging a man is his own prediction of future performance. If he is too optimistic, he is unlikely to suffer the consequences because those to whom he made the predictions will have left, and the new middle management will be unable to reconstruct past history. Alternatively, the man himself will have changed jobs to further his personal growth. The main task for a dynamic employee, therefore, is to devise plausible but highly optimistic predictions of future performances. He would, of course, be wise to make his most impressive predictions about the later stages of the project's development (such as design implementation, checkout of design and getting the product into production); however, he is influenced in the opposite direction, because the early stages (establishing the bounds of the problem and devising the overall plan) are under his individual control and a short time taken here to achieve success will redound more to his genius than will success in later stages. ...
The Come-On Shareholders and bankers like to have their money invested in a secure, steady company, but one which also has its eye on the future and has the possibility of high growth and profit. For this reason, to create the best image, a company needs to put some of its effort into a come-on - that is, a dreamy sort of a project, full of technical complexity and obscurantism, staffed by a bunch of enthusiastic young graduates hot from university with their heads still in the clouds, and often presided over by the resident genius. ...
The Semi-Blackmail The only real route to security is the semi-blackmail. If a man knows that you can damage him if he tries to get you fired, you are safe. If you smell a Con Game, that one of your boss's projects is an obvious waste of money, take an interest in that project, enough to show him that you see that it is fraudulent. Other obvious grounds for semi-blackmails are the normal sources of scandal - corruption, sex and so on. A complex web of illicit liaisons can stabilize the situation wonderfully. ...
________________________________________________________________________
Ivor Catt also has material on weaponry:
Stingray
Whenever a major scandal hit GEC, Weinstock would rename it Marconi, and vice versa. [Note: next page has more on Weinstock by Catt; scroll down] MPs were too dim to realise that all the weapons scandals involved the single company. In this document, GEC stands for GEC or Marconi.
Stingray was special. GEC operated a number of “defence” weapon “design” scams, and Stingray was by far the most surreal. ... [I] got a job as the top EMC magician on the Stingray torpedo in Stanmore, Middlesex. As one of them, I was more able to set about finding out what they knew. ... After a few days I found out that their bible was the £400 Don White manual. However, no other EMC experts would lend me their copy, or let me see it. After about ten days, however, I met a man who sold EMC devices imported from Los Angeles to our weapons industry. He volunteered to lend me the EMC bible, which was one of his products, for two or three weeks. When I asked him why, he said that he had mixed loyalty. On the one hand he was happy take a 10p capacitor manufactured in Los Angeles, renamed an EMC capacitor, sold to him for £2 for him to mark up to £5 and then sell to GEC. On the other hand, he was also a taxpayer, and was appalled by the drain on the taxpayer.
It took me a day or two to find out that Don White and his EMC cardinals were technically ignorant. I wrote a document blowing the gaff on them. ...
__________________________________
In late 1980, Catt had a discussion, or tried to have a discussion, with the Ministry of Defence, and wrote---
There will have been numerous attempts to reform the state of the 'defence' industry, all of which have failed. It is now generally agreed that the industry is completely out of control. It is also clear that the amount of money it is soaking up, and the amount of damage it is doing, is on the increase. The damage comes under various categories.
1. Useless development projects prevent the start of viable projects, so that no viable weaponry can be developed.
2. As the amount of money being poured into these useless projects has now reached the rate of hundreds of millions of pounds per year, the 'defence' industry has become a prime factor, probably the major factor, in the collapse of our economy.
3. The 'defence' industry soaks up all money that would otherwise be available for high technology projects, so that experts in a number of key technologies are sucked in and prevented from doing useful work. Also, the development of their expertise comes to a halt. For instance, the nonsensical 'defence' projects over the last five or ten years have wrecked the British electronics profession, so that there is no longer in this country a viable electronic technology professional infrastructure which might be used as a basis for the starting up of a viable, real, defence industry, or other industry with significant electronics content.
4. The politicians, who are technically ignorant, are no match for the civil servants, who make decisions on where the money will be jettisoned. In any case, politicians do not last long enough to take any very useful action, but merely resort to a 'holding' action to prevent trouble from surfacing during their tenure.
5. It is not clear why the civil servants are willing to throw away such quantities of taxpayers' money. One good reason, of course, is empire building. Another is that civil servants, on retirement, take jobs with the companies they were previously funding. Certainly this applies to the key, senior, decision making civil servants. It is quite possible that in general, no direct corruption of civil servants by companies receiving MoD money is involved. The large scale employment of retired army generals etc. by the companies would explain the racket to some extent, if it can be shown that senior military men have close connections with senior MoD men. Of course, the generals could call for the development of particular kinds of weapons shortly before retirement. That would close the loop.
6. It is virtually certain that a very large percentage of civil servants in the MoD are as concerned as I am about the present situation; possibly all of them.
7. The level of investment in defence by our enemies will relate to our expenditure on defence and 'defence', rather than on the weaponry we develop. This means that phoney defence projects are particularly dangerous, since they incite our enemies to arm while leaving us defenceless.
8. The impotence of the politicians plus the blockage of the Official Secrets Act mean that the only place where reform could originate is the MoD. Alternatively, the limits of the Official Secrets Act need to be tested. This latter might be investigated by canvassing the judges who handle cases of breach of the Official Secrets Act. They could be asked whether there is a limit to the amount of taxpayers' money that can be jettisoned before the Official Secrets Act has been ipso facto rendered inoperative. I personally would put the figure at £100,000,000. Also, politicians could be canvassed with the same question, with a view to modifying the Official Secrets Act to make it inoperative in the case of misuse of funds at a level exceeding £100,000,000.
9. Superficially, it might be argued that it is in the national interest to suppress evidence that major weapons development projects have failed. However, now that we can see that frequent suppression of such information has led to this country being disarmed while inciting others to arm, we should conclude that our best interests have not been served by secrecy. Secrecy has first and foremost made possible the swindling of the country by manufacturers of phoney products, and the damage far outweighs any good achieved by secrecy. In the light of the experience of the last few years, politicians should consider whether secrecy has aided this country or damaged it.
10. The Nuremberg Trials established that when a governmental system breaks down, individuals within organisations have individual responsibility in the case of major decision making. Politicians do not last long enough, or have enough competence, to control the major, disastrous 'defence' projects currently in 'progress' in this country. Civil servants, on the other hand, are paid to have such technical competence, understanding and control. The man or committee member who signs away, for instance, the next £200,000,000 on Stingray, was paid his salary on the understanding that he would make himself competent to judge whether he was conniving in the waste of taxpayers' money.
Mod: added later; the file 'gamoe.htm' is Catt's account of his 1980 meeting with some Ministry of Defence officials:–
In early July [1980], Ivor Catt wrote to his M.P. expressing concern about the state of certain MoD funded defence projects in industry. After some involvement with the Minister of State for Defence and the Attorney General, a meeting between Catt and some MoD officials was arranged.
REPORT ON THE MEETING OF 14 NOV. 1980
Location. Main Building, MoD, Whitehall. Time 10.30 a.m.
Present. Ivor Catt
For MoD.
J.M. Gibbon, Heat of International and Industrial Policy Division 1
Mr. Lidgett
Mr. Hurr
Mr. Maloney
The meeting lasted three hours. The MoD men refused to supply Catt with any information whatsoever. They told him nothing that they could not have told a representative of a hostile government. (Anthony Jay would say that that was exactly what he was!)
Gibbon was an administrator. The rest were engineers. They were unaware of the reality in the 'defence' projects in GEC companies. [nov1998. In the intervening twenty years, in spite of the govt. slush fund, GEC shares fared badly compared with other shares in their sector. However, the two carriages taking the Queen and the Duke to Ascot this summer also contained the Chief Executive of GEC and his wife.]
They all agreed that they did not want to take up Catt's proposal, that they meet five people working in GEC 'defence' projects, to get confirmation of Catt's allegations.
Hurr identified closely with upper management of GEC. He said he "had known Mariner (a senior manager in GEC-MAV) since he started at the work bench." Hurr fits very well into the role suggested in Wireless World, Nov. 1980, page 57;
"In the electronics industry the norm is for a technically ignorant and careless customer to accept useless equipment from a technically ignorant manufacturer. The so-called 'trials' are rigged. Corruption is not generally involved; only stupidity and misplaced loyalty on the part of the treacherous representatives of the long-suffering taxpayer."
Hurr was very conscious of the fact that GEC was rare in having engineers in high positions in management. It is quite possible that he has over-reacted to this knowledge and poured money into GEC on the mistaken assumption that the presence of engineers in high places proves that things are as they should be.
Although the MoD men refused to give any information as to their responsibilities, it seemed clear to me that most of those present had too much to defend in their past actions, in funding GEC etc., and will concentrate on defending the past at the expense of the future. Defence of past actions means throwing good (taxpayers') money after bad.
During the meeting, Hurr developed the theory that Catt had connived in the design/development of faulty equipment.
Gibbon could usefully regard the meeting as a situation where the administrator (himself) played off MoD engineers against another engineer (Catt).
Catt asked Maloney to give two criteria that he would use to judge the competence of a company. Catt claimed that any criteria must rate GEC-MSDS worse than other companies. Maloney refused to give any criteria except "Do they deliver?" He later agreed with Catt that the specification of what was to be delivered was nowadays written by the supplier, not the customer. (In such a situation, it would take a very odd supplier to fail to 'deliver'.) The MoD men all said that it was the new government policy to have the supplier specify the product, rather than (as in the past) the customer (i.e. MoD).
When Catt asked the MoD men to examine any GEC library and note the absence of any technical books less than ten years old, Maloney said this might lead to better designs. This was typical of his general attitude.
They refused to supply any information as to their responsibilities or functions, although pressed for this a number of times. I would surmise that Hurr is the top technical man, responsible for the major decisions of the last few years - funding Tornado, AEW, Stingray etc - and would suffer should Catt be proved right in his allegations.
It became clear that the MoD men will treat the meeting like a bad dream. [nov98. I am told that one died of a heart attack two weeks later.] Their refusal to meet other dissidents working on these projects I regard as very significant. Presumably it would be convenient to limit the subject to Catt, so that it can be dismissed as some individual aberration.
The best chance of some reforming action is I think with Gibbon, but I fear that even he is too responsible for past errors to be able to do much. [signed] Ivor Catt
Mod: This is Catt writing in 2003 about the same company, which had a share-price crash in late 2001 and disappeared in 2006; Ew is 'Electronics Weekly' and he uses his own date notation:–
[Name in techie magazine] is completely wrong [about GEC / Marconi] , as are the technology-free journalists who write about the spectacularly rapid collapse of GEC. In 1980 I was so concerned about the state of Weinstock’s GEC that the Attorney-General arranged a meeting for me with the chief procurement officers in the MoD in Whitehall, see https://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/gamoe.htm , which was written at the time. I was in the employment of GEC when I blew the whistle.
In 2001, long before GEC collapsed, I put onto my website at https://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/19161.htm ; “I have written that it is obvious that Weinstock, head of GEC, was not operating a major serial scam against the taxpayer because he accompanied the Queen alone in her carriage on the way to Epsom races while his wife accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh alone in the next carriage.” GEC was an empty shell in 1980, lacking middle management and lacking technical expertise. Both cost money, and Weinstock fired any divisional manager who did not show improved profit for the next six months. Today’s journalists have failed to check back to what was written at the time about the undermining of GEC by Weinstock. “GEC operated a number of ‘defence’ weapon ‘design’ scams …. “ [Ivor Catt, Ewmay03, p46.] The collapse of the Cold War undermined the scale of these scams, and so GEC’s collapse was inevitable, long before the maligned Lord Simpson arrived on the scene. All GEC had was a money mountain. Simpson had to try to buy in management and technical competence. But read https://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/20435.html “both Lord Simpson and John Mayo are accountants by profession” At, https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/1527551.stm we read; “The name Marconi once stood for all that was great about British inventiveness. Now, it is the symbol of how badly things can go wrong. Guglielmo Marconi, who gave the company its name, was the co-inventor of the radio. He must be turning in his grave.”
Like a pack of wolves, technically ignorant journalists have got the date wrong. As engineers who were employed by GEC (except for Blythe) know, Weinstock turned GEC into an empty shell decades before Simpson arrived. Weinstock covered up using “defence” scams against the taxpayer. Simpson failed to restart the Cold War, the only way to save GEC, unless he bought up real companies, which he tried to do. How could the accountant Simpson tell that the dot.com bubble might burst? It was no more wowsy than “defence”.
I remember when GEC’s Technical Director called all the “engineers” (?milkmen?) together in GEC Chaucer House Portsmouth. He said; “I have good news for you. We have trebled our spend capability.”
To explain. I have it on good authority that “defence” scams were cost plus 14%. GEC would be more profitable if it could “spend” more taxpayers’ money. We “engineers” on the Tornado and Tigerfish projects were there to absorb the 100%, leaving GEC with the 14%. A good reason for employing contract engineers would have been if contract agencies paid off a west country front company set up by MoD staff in return for the MoD giving them the job of recruiting contract engineers for GEC. The collapse of the USSR would cause all such ruses to collapse.
Ivor Catt 22may03/ 1 june03
Unfortunately, Catt is light on evidence, and also light on the actual importance of money, having apparently no way to assess the comparative importance of the money wasted - in the great scheme of things, it may not amount to much. In fact, it's perfectly possible the amount to be scammed is selected to be as high as practicably possible in the economy concerned, taking account of all the other scams. The revisionist view is that the Cold War was a Jewish-controlled fraud, including numerous scams—'nuclear weapons', 'nuclear power', wars generated to use up bombs and equipment, internal frauds involving improperly audited sales between organisations.
Mod: Below is a typical example of a British worker's attitude to Weinstock and GEC, from a nationalist website, Sept 2012 (spelling etc conventionalised); how naive these people are:–
Lord Weinstock of course was Jewish and so of course had access to cash that non-Jewish business men could only dream about. But regardless of that he and his father must have been brilliant to build GEC to what it was when he was alive. Unfortunately the company no longer exists because the two idiots from Marconi--part of GEC--who took over when Weinstock retired ran the company into the ground. When Weinstock was in charge the Government used to use GEC's cash balance of twenty two billion pounds as a permanent source of borrowing. The demise of another British company which,at one time,ran dozens of factories including English Electric and Napiers in Liverpool. This is all very boring, but the point is that Weinstock, like Hanson and some other old style business men seemed to have had a different approach then. And off topic again it looks like the next British company to fall--to the French of all people--will be BA Systems. It was initially reported as 'a merger' but now it has changed to 'a sale.' More British tradesmen and engineers out of work. That's what the French do--buy our businesses and take the jobs to France.
Some notes on Jews in China (added 21 Mar 2017)