I want everyone to understand exactly how dangerous the "means testing industrial complex" truly is.
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I want everyone to understand exactly how dangerous the "means testing industrial complex" truly is. Lay it on 'em,
jwzWe just about had to allocate someone to babysitting that paperwork full-time for six months. The effort and complexity was far beyond the reach of most small businesses, which is why most of the money for these grants went to billion-dollar corporate grifters instead of to the people it was supposed to help
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I want everyone to understand exactly how dangerous the "means testing industrial complex" truly is. Lay it on 'em,
jwzWe just about had to allocate someone to babysitting that paperwork full-time for six months. The effort and complexity was far beyond the reach of most small businesses, which is why most of the money for these grants went to billion-dollar corporate grifters instead of to the people it was supposed to help
The really crazy thing is that this is not only true when a private business receives grant funding from a government agency, but it is also true when an agency receives funding from another agency.
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I want everyone to understand exactly how dangerous the "means testing industrial complex" truly is. Lay it on 'em,
jwzWe just about had to allocate someone to babysitting that paperwork full-time for six months. The effort and complexity was far beyond the reach of most small businesses, which is why most of the money for these grants went to billion-dollar corporate grifters instead of to the people it was supposed to help
@codinghorror phobos did the ppp loan/grant thing in 2020 and it was like, a month of me running around being an accountant, calculating various payroll numbers they wanted, fetching various bits and bobs of intel and one-liners from incorporation paperwork, computing how much medical insurance costs were
then like a year later the headlines started landing of companies defrauding the program for tens of millions. i guess nobody was actually looking at the numbers?
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@codinghorror phobos did the ppp loan/grant thing in 2020 and it was like, a month of me running around being an accountant, calculating various payroll numbers they wanted, fetching various bits and bobs of intel and one-liners from incorporation paperwork, computing how much medical insurance costs were
then like a year later the headlines started landing of companies defrauding the program for tens of millions. i guess nobody was actually looking at the numbers?
@codinghorror oh, and phobos was four people at the time.
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@codinghorror oh, and phobos was four people at the time.
@codinghorror we got fucked an entirely different way.
gusto, our former payroll provider, offered us up an "employee retention credit", where if we didnt lay people off during the plague, we got to keep the tax they would ordinarily collect for payroll taxes (which is a fucked concept in its entirety outright). which amounted to about 15k for the applicable quarters
3 years go by and gusto like .. changes their minds? they filed a retraction with the irs.
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@codinghorror we got fucked an entirely different way.
gusto, our former payroll provider, offered us up an "employee retention credit", where if we didnt lay people off during the plague, we got to keep the tax they would ordinarily collect for payroll taxes (which is a fucked concept in its entirety outright). which amounted to about 15k for the applicable quarters
3 years go by and gusto like .. changes their minds? they filed a retraction with the irs.
@codinghorror so now suddenly, out of nowhere, we get this bill for 15 grand from the irs and theyre pissed because its phrased like we were trying to defaud them or something.
so i call up gusto, asking wtf.
gusto points to their contract which says "we are not liable for our own mistakes"turned out that we didnt actually qualify for the program, and the surfaced the option to us ANYWAY. so it was their fuckup, but it cost us 15 grand.
so yeah, avoid gusto
theyre incompetent -
@codinghorror so now suddenly, out of nowhere, we get this bill for 15 grand from the irs and theyre pissed because its phrased like we were trying to defaud them or something.
so i call up gusto, asking wtf.
gusto points to their contract which says "we are not liable for our own mistakes"turned out that we didnt actually qualify for the program, and the surfaced the option to us ANYWAY. so it was their fuckup, but it cost us 15 grand.
so yeah, avoid gusto
theyre incompetent -
@codinghorror i have a bunch of horror stories from running a security startup, and MOST of them are related to the bureaucracy of running the shops back-of-the-house, vs the actual infosec stuff
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@codinghorror i have a bunch of horror stories from running a security startup, and MOST of them are related to the bureaucracy of running the shops back-of-the-house, vs the actual infosec stuff
@Viss blog 'em! I wanna read and learn!
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