So where the fuck did those $4.5 millies go? Well, let me show you! When the planning occurred with [REDACTED] he had a plan for 6 different sub-projects within this 1 project. Like 6 goals or objectives that he was trying to achieve and he had allocated the $4.5M across the 6 projects. This is to pay for labor and non-labor like computers, software licenses, etc. This is all pretty standard (or nominal) for our industry and probably most corporate companies.
He sent that up the food chain to get the director to approve it and “release the funds” so he could start hiring or getting people to start the work. Except, the director had low-key cooked the books and set up 2 more sub-projects in addition to the original 6 that [REDACTED] had planned for. But all 8 total sub-projects still had to share the $4.5M. The issue was that the 2 sub-projects added by the director of the organization took the majority of the $4.5M for his 2 projects. So the rest of the projects had to share $1.2M instead of $4.5M.
Yeah, you rad that right. The 2 sub-projects that the director added and approved funding for got a full $3.3M of the originally allocated budget. Now this in and of itself isn’t the suspicious part. It is the reason [REDACTED] hit the eject button though. He was pissed (rightly so) that he did all the planning and made all these promises to get 1/3 of the budget to execute without being told he would only have 1/3 of the budget to execute. You can imagine how that would be upsetting from his point of view, and he is as petty as me, so he bounced with no 2 week notice and disappeared into a classified program never to be heard from again. Quite literally, it is incredibly hard to get a hold of people who work in those areas because you can’t have access to the outside world. So he didn’t pass along any information whatsoever until months later.
He wasn’t part of the meetings with the sector leads to discuss how their work wouldn’t be completed after all and their money went towards 2 other things they didn’t know existed. You might be asking yourself at this point what are these 2 sub-projects that were added that required so much money to complete? That is a great question and I would love to tell you.
*Drum Roll*…. The 2 sub-projects added were not projects. They were accounts to pay for all the leadership in the organization.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Let that soak in. This director took $3.3M to pay his staff so the other projects in his portfolio had more money and didn’t have to pay the most expensive team members which are the program and technical managers. All of these people have 6 figure salaries and bonus packages that got paid out of the money for my engineering area. This is what Jessica found out when [REDACTED] said he was upset about the administrative costs. It was literally all the cost. They named this “project” technology transition so that it sounded like they were doing something and thought no one would be the wiser. Jessica started pulling audit reports and now we know where ever cent of the $4.5M went. We documented the fuck out of every charge from every individual to the bucket of money that they were supposed to use to actually produce something.
So what did they do with the other $1.2M? Well, they spent money on ChatGPT and delivered what we call a “white paper”. A white paper is exactly what it sounds like. It’s like a book report on a technology that you make available publicly. It’s to get clout for the company and buzz that boosts your stock price. It was about how to embed AI into this kinds of engineering to enhance its resulting quality.
To recap:
- $4.5M was allocated to my specialty engineering area
- $3.3M of that total was given to pay for a bunch of managers for other projects
- the remaining $1.2M was used to pay other people to deliver a 6 page book report on AI
- the organization that was going to work on my specialty area told me to hire people to do the work
- they then decided they didn’t want to use those people, so instead of firing someone I just hired I kept them on my team
- the organization also decided they were not going to collaborate with us once budgets got slashed
- Rachel was intentionally put in charge to heissman me into finding out that they were effectively stealing money from the company
And my boss still hasn’t spoken to me in months….