Found out someone defrauding the ir system

[Pusser]

Yes, reporting wrongdoings is the right thing to do.  Having said this, you better have you facts straight and be confident in your allegations: they will have career effects on the alleged offender.

I find, in situations like this, talking to the person (sober) and getting their full (sober) side of the story and provide advise goes a long way.  Or talk to the member's supervisor directly.

The trouble with talking to the person, even when sober, is that depending on the power dynamic between the two, it could make the working relationship difficult - regardless of the outcome of the conversation.  Irrespective of the words used, there is no way to politely and gently work a possible accusation of a crime into a conversation.  I would only have this conversation with an actual friend, not just a work colleague.  From what I can see from this, I would think the very best solution would be to report this either through the whistleblowing process or even directly to the Military Police.  They will conduct an investigation.  If charges are warranted, they will lay them. In which case the whistleblower definitely did the right thing.  If the investigation concludes that everything is OK, then no harm.  Being investigated only means that something appeared amiss.  It does not mean that something wrong actually happened.  If this does not result in a trial, then the identity of the whistleblower need never be known.

 

[McG]

Ok.  Take the jousting to the PMs.

Roger.  I'll switch tack to just giving better advice to the OP myself.


Markopolo,
Your initial post presented a concern that a Capt was taking government money to which he is not entitled, and your language implied he was cognizant of what he was doing. Your second post confirms that he is not only cognizant but boastful of his behaviour.  You asked why you and your husband should become involved.  The answer is because if you do nothing, you are allowing the crime to go uncorrected.  If you do nothing you are enabling the crime to continue.  Your husband has a military duty to report while you do not, but ethically you are both involved; you both have an ethical duty to do something.  This is not a moral dilemma; there are clear right and wrong answers.  You can choose to do nothing and facilitate the crime, or you can choose something to make the situation right.

You or your husband could confront the Capt about his behaviour.  While this may cause him to correct his behaviour going forward, it could also facilitate his hiding of previously received unearned money.  Given that you have presented the Capt as being cognizant and unremorseful of his actions, I would suggest that you have an ethical obligation to report this if you believe the allegation that you have posted in this thread.

You have been cautioned in this thread to worry about many things for which you do not need to worry.  You do not need your husband’s permission to report a crime that you believe to have happened. You do not need to consult a lawyer to report a crime that you believe to have happened.  You do not need to confront an individual before you report a crime that you believed they committed.  You do not need to worry about what consequences may come if due process confirms the occurrence of a crime that you reported because you believed it to have happened. You do not need to confirm beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has been committed, you just need to reasonably believe that a crime has been committed and once you hit that threshold you have an ethical obligation to do something.

Your reporting of the crime you believe to have happened will trigger processes that address all the things that others have suggested are your problem to resolve first.  Your complaint will initiate an investigation.  The investigator will have access to the relevant policies and subject matter experts. The Capt will be afforded procedural fairness during a military investigation as even our administrative investigations require people be informed of and given opportunity to respond to adverse evidence against them. Investigators, charge layers, and presiding officers are all required to get advice from a lawyer at various stages of the process.  If after an investigation it is determined that a service or criminal offence if probable, there will still be a trial at which the Capt will be afforded opportunity to defend himself.  If administrative conduct are performance deficiencies are suggested by the investigation, the procedures again require that the Capt be given opportunity to represent his position to the decision maker before sever consequences are applied.  If he feels he has been treated wrongly by either administrative or disciplinary processes, he has recourses available circumstances to have his situation reviewed. So let the system work.

If there is concern about blow-back from a power imbalance, there are still options available.  Your husband can take the problem to the unit chief clerk, talk to the unit ethics advisor, or engage any other officer or sr NCO he trusts.  Either one of you can report this to the MPs or even to the RCMP.  As another option, the whistle blower site has already been linked for you.

… and if the ethical argument is not enough, then do something out of anger as a taxpayer.  If you believe the allegation that you have posted, then this Capt has stolen a few thousand to a few tens of thousands (depending on local entitlement and what he is renting) of money that really belongs to all Canadians.

So, here's a situation that might just make all of this somewhat moot.

Does the Capt have kids?  If so, and custody has yet to be determined via a separation agreement or the courts, then the Capt, as the father, is still considered as having custody of the children, even if he and his wife are separated. (As is she, mind you, but that's not being disputed.)  So, his IR would still be valid, would it not? Especially if the reason for IR was for the kids' sake.

Read the policy link that I posted.  This is irrelevant to IR status (and thus to SE entitlement)

 

[Navy_Pete]

Flip side to folks defrauding something like IR generally is that, rather than punish the offender, the machine tends to use it as an excuse to cut the benefits.

You don't get any separation expenses on IR anymore; you get a max rate for your area plus parking, and that's it.  You used to get SE, but they cut that due to the number of folks using IR as a 'paid divorce'.  Spent 18 months on IR recently, hard on the marriage, and cost me a fair bit out of pocket to travel back to see the family once in a while, so there was a big financial and personal cost to the whole thing.

So aside from individual impacts of abusing a benefit, there is also long lasting impacts on a big group of people.  There are lots of people that have perfectly legitimate reasons for IR that struggle it in a worse spot then the knobs that milked it for years after their spouse stopped talking to them.

 

[McG]

Pers on IR still get SE. The accommodations payments up to maximum local rate are SE. There used to be additional components to SE, but those were cut in about 2011/2012.

 

[Pusser]

Only the food portion was removed from SE.  The reasoning was that you have to buy your food at home, so buying it while on IR was not a significant hardship.  SE has never included compensation for travel back home (we have LTA for that).

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Considering divorces can mess with peoples heads, would the Base Chaplin be a useful resource for either of the parties to use?

 

[PMedMoe]

SE has never included compensation for travel back home (we have LTA for that).

Yeah...once a year if you're far enough away.  :

I kind of agree with Navy_Pete.  I do think that fraud was one of the reasons for some of the IR cuts.  Never mind the food (it wasn't much anyway), but they did used to cover basic cable, internet and phone too and that got kiboshed a while ago.

Audits??  I never had one.  Personally, I hope this Capt gets charged if the allegations are true.

 

[McG]

I kind of agree with Navy_Pete.  I do think that fraud was one of the reasons for some of the IR cuts. 

If I can believe a somewhat spiteful commentary from one DCBA civilian officer from the time (I think he was a section head or deputy of some sort), then it was a factor.  He also seemed to be of the view that most members on IR were scamming the system, and everyone else was enabling them.  He trotted out numbers to illustrate the scope of multi-year frauds that were being found.  It is all the more reason these incidents need to be reported when people believe them to be happening.  Fraud needs to be stopped before it gets into the bureaucrats' levels of hysteria (or at least its penetration needs to be minimised if it has already reached those heights), and desirably decision-makers recognize that enablers are a small minority of the CAF community.

... also, I would not be sad to learn that the mentioned DCBA staffer has moved on to other employment, but there is nothing that we in this thread can do about that.

 

[PMedMoe]

He also seemed to be of the view that most members on IR were scamming the system, and everyone else was enabling them.  He trotted out numbers to illustrate the scope of multi-year frauds that were being found.  It is all the more reason these incidents need to be reported when people believe them to be happening.

Yep.  With the exception of married service members, IR was supposed to be temporary.  How many people with civilian spouses were on IR for years just because the spouse was tired of moving?? 

 

[Jarnhamar]

Plot Twist: the op is actually the editor  of maple leafs "what would you do?" ethics articles experimenting with a live interactive audience.

 

[Gunner98]

Yep.  With the exception of married service members, IR was supposed to be temporary.  How many people with civilian spouses were on IR for years just because the spouse was tired of moving??

I resemble that remark.  Family home was in Petawawa and IR was in Ottawa to complete Masters degree and then posted to a HQ.    My wife had lived in Ottawa on two previous postings (one with her father and one with me).  She had a good job in Pembroke and my 3 kids were able to finish up high school.  Both of my sons ended up at university in Ottawa.  I was on IR when the food allowance ceased and that led someone folks to reconsider their restrictions. Earlier in my career I was in NB 1991-93, NS 1993-94 and MB 1994-1998.  When you live in 3 provinces across a span of 16 months with 3 small children it is easy to grow tired of moving.  We used to say once the moving boxes are empty and the pictures are finally hung at the new place, it was time to start packing all over again. I spent the better part of 7 years between pre-deployment training, deployment and IR living away from family.  Then I packed it in and my marriage is still recovering 5 years later.

 

[garb811]

Yep.  With the exception of married service members, IR was supposed to be temporary.  How many people with civilian spouses were on IR for years just because the spouse was tired of moving??

A Navy friend went on 3 x IR simply because he knew at the end of each posting, he was going back to his home port.  He didn't see the point of moving his family when he knew he was only going to be away for 3, max 4 years at a time.  While I don't fault him for doing that, it certainly isn't something many of us have the luxury of knowing and certainly wasn't the intent of the IR system.

 

[Halifax Tar]

A Navy friend went on 3 x IR simply because he knew at the end of each posting, he was going back to his home port.  He didn't see the point of moving his family when he knew he was only going to be away for 3, max 4 years at a time.  While I don't fault him for doing that, it certainly isn't something many of us have the luxury of knowing and certainly wasn't the intent of the IR system.

HPD (Home Port Division) is a strictly RCN thing.  It puts a tether on sailors.  They will always go back to their list HPD.  Keep in mind, for most hard sea trades there us only 2 base to work at HFX and ESQ.  Everything else is temporary.

Also the HPD only covers the hard sea trades.  Those of us in Log, MED, MET or any other ships crew who don't wear an anchor are not included.

 

[Navy_Pete]

Only the food portion was removed from SE.  The reasoning was that you have to buy your food at home, so buying it while on IR was not a significant hardship.  SE has never included compensation for travel back home (we have LTA for that).

Fair enough, but I don't really get the same economies of scale cooking for one I do at home.  That's not really a big deal for me, and I generally had at least lunch on the ship, but when a single IR posting cost about $14k/year of the allowances (that go direct to the landlord) and saved two full cost moves at $40-50k each, seems like a petty thing to cut.  The business case on it is pretty easy, as even a 4 year swing saves the CAF a lot.  Also completely screwed the people that had to stay on base that now had to pay the outrageously high meal plan costs, so for anyone on a course on SE it was pretty brutal.  Understand they changed that after about a year, but knew a few people that turned down career courses because they couldn't reasonably afford an extra $800 month for the meal plan on top of the other expenses that wrack up when your spouse is left behind (extra daycare etc).

I don't regret it; it was a high tempo job, with 6-7 day workweeks and lots of time at sea, so made sense.  I basically just banked my sea pay and used that to travel home on a few times and offset the other costs, but figure I was overall still out of pocket, so it's definitely not a way to make any money.

As an aside, RCMP and other departments have the same benefit, but their capped monthly rate is almost double.  In Halifax that resulted in most of the nice furnished apartments being $800-$1000 higher than what is covered.  I was glad to find somewhere close enough that I could walk that didn't have bedbugs, and had a bbq so it wasn't bad.

Bit of a non-sequitur, but the only upside of the IR place was the bbqs on the back deck, and unwinding over some grill smoke and the odd beer there while chatting to the neighbors doing the same was one of the few bright spots in the series of 12+hour days away from home.

 

[Halifax Tar]

Fair enough, but I don't really get the same economies of scale cooking for one I do at home.  That's not really a big deal for me, and I generally had at least lunch on the ship, but when a single IR posting cost about $14k/year of the allowances (that go direct to the landlord) and saved two full cost moves at $40-50k each, seems like a petty thing to cut.  The business case on it is pretty easy, as even a 4 year swing saves the CAF a lot.  Also completely screwed the people that had to stay on base that now had to pay the outrageously high meal plan costs, so for anyone on a course on SE it was pretty brutal.  Understand they changed that after about a year, but knew a few people that turned down career courses because they couldn't reasonably afford an extra $800 month for the meal plan on top of the other expenses that wrack up when your spouse is left behind (extra daycare etc).

I don't regret it; it was a high tempo job, with 6-7 day workweeks and lots of time at sea, so made sense.  I basically just banked my sea pay and used that to travel home on a few times and offset the other costs, but figure I was overall still out of pocket, so it's definitely not a way to make any money.

As an aside, RCMP and other departments have the same benefit, but their capped monthly rate is almost double.  In Halifax that resulted in most of the nice furnished apartments being $800-$1000 higher than what is covered.  I was glad to find somewhere close enough that I could walk that didn't have bedbugs, and had a bbq so it wasn't bad.

Bit of a non-sequitur, but the only upside of the IR place was the bbqs on the back deck, and unwinding over some grill smoke and the odd beer there while chatting to the neighbors doing the same was one of the few bright spots in the series of 12+hour days away from home.

Good post Pete.  I did 4 years on IR, Halifax - Kingston.  I feel your pain.  Its a good program and its very useful.  In my case I lived off base in the extreme west end of Kingston in a basement apartment.  Also there are those people out there who will make snide remarks about you being on IR or your spouses "inability to move".  Just shrug that off.

I know I may be one of the few, but I really wanted to live in Barracks and eat at the mess, but the BComd had a policy that was a no go for that.  Give me free rations and quarters and let me buy my own net connection and I would be a happy dude.