No one wants to believe there's corruption in the world, but it's there, hiding behind the thin veils of our truth. It's easier to think everyone is as honest as us, but let's be up front here, not everyone reading this is on the side of the law. Instead, you or someone you know may be involved in a bit of corruption. Maybe not cooperate level, espionage-type stuff, but even something as small scale as a church charity can be run into the ground be greed.
Reddit user, u/ajlk24, wanted to get the juicy, awful deets when they asked:
What is the most corrupt thing you've ever experienced?
The Ink Matters Most
EMS guy: In the days before the internet, I got fired by a (private) ambulance company for using the wrong pen to fill out Medicaid forms after a run. I used a ballpoint instead of the soft tip Flair pens and was immediately sacked by the owner.
A few years later, I found out he was imprisoned for Medicaid fraud. Turns out the soft tip pens he provided didn't go through all the carbon copies on the forms, and he was changing the bottom sheet to show more miles and services for each ambulance run (before sending them to the state). The day I used the ballpoint was for a very long ride, and cost him a lot of (fraudulent) money. That's why he was so infuriated.
A Church Against Its Principles
I worked as a counselor at a youth shelter. Almost all the food/clothes were donated by local churches, and they didn't buy anything for the kids, so theoretically they were just paying to keep the lights on and to keep on minimum wage staff. They had a ridiculous amount of grant money, enough to cover the food/clothes plus activities for the kids if they had had to pay for those things. Yet they skimped out on essential things like training.
They gave me a CP certification without ever giving me any training. The shelter had rats and roaches and at times bed bugs. The heat was out for a month, during a blizzard, on Christmas, with girls residing at the shelter. I reported them and nothing happened except them interrogating the entire staff to find out who snitched. So clearly a lot of people were getting paid the money that was supposed to be going to homeless youth. Worst place I ever worked.
It's The Things You Don't See
I won't go into details, but I work for a municipality as a fairly low level employee. I've been offered bribes on a number of occasions to let things slide here and there. All very tempting but I like my job too much to risk it for $20 or so.
Long story short the biggest bribe I have been offered is $1000. I reported it to my supervisor and his response was "f-ck dude why didn't you take it? I sure as hell would have" but we filed an official report. Didn't go anywhere as I didn't know the name of the people.
Makes me wonder what else is going on that I don't know about.
Skimming A Lot Off The Top
When I was getting food at food banks, the employees and volunteers would take the best quality/tastiest food for themselves or their friends.
That's one of the reasons I don't donate to food banks, one time my uncle did plumbing service to a costumer house and she asked if she could pay for it with goods.
Uncle was a bit confused until she showed her garage with shelves filled with a shocking amount of cans and food packages... She worked as a volunteer for a food bank and kept the food, and I bet she wasn't the only one doing it. He refused that as a payment.
A Cube Of Sin
An old friend of mine got a job working for a church based charity. They would accept household donations and sell them in a thrift store they had set up to raise funds for the needy. His job was to drive around in a cube van, pick up the donated items and deliver them to the charity.
He openly bragged about picking the best items for himself and would drop them off at his house before delivering the rest of the items to the charity. I called him out on it and told him it was a bad idea seeing as his cousin and two aunts worked there and put in a good word for him to get hired. That's when he told me that they've been doing the same thing for years. He told me his aunts wouldn't even keep most what they stole, rather they would sell the items at garage sales and that it was ok because, " that's how they make their money".
To make matters worse, they were paid in cash so they could keep collecting welfare. Pure trash and needless to say I have nothing to do with them anymore.
In A Den Of Wolves
Realizing that I was the only one who wasn't stealing from the company.
Used to work in the IT department, and over time I noticed that things were going missing. Replace a bunch of monitors in a lab, then a few weeks later notice all the old ones are back - what happened to the ones I just delivered? We don't have nearly as many of something in stock as it says on our shipping receipt. And why are we always out of service kits for the copy machines?
Yeah, all of that was going on ebay or craigslist or somewhere else. Didn't realize it for years, maybe I'm just really oblivious, but the whole department was in on this.
Ugh... College...
My university makes us buy a public speaking textbook (published by the university) and tear rubrics out of it. Your grades are penalized if you don't turn in the rubric torn out of the book for the teacher to mark your grade on.
This ensures that you can't resell your book, so the next class has to buy brand new books.
All the while, the university is putting up signs about why you should recycle.
Not big compared to some others here, but I'm still salty about it.
"Know the law people. Don't let anyone try to pull one over on you."
My wife and I bought a house. The landlord wanted access to the apartment we were living in in the mean time so he could renovate it and sell it at an exorbitant price. We told him multiple times that we were going to keep and maintain the apartment to the end of our lease (only had 23 days left), and that we were going to clean it, etc, like normal. He didn't like that. So he performed an illegal lockout, then charged us a $750 cleaning fee saying we left it a mess, the entire $1900 rent for the last month and attempted to keep our $1900 security deposit.
What he didn't know is I'm not one of these uninformed foreigners he's used to threatening (I live in NYC in Bensonhurst which has a heavy Russian/Pol/Italian and Chinese immigrant population). I know the law damn well. So I went to the apartment and recorded him in the act of locking me out. I'm big Black dude so I was showing restraint by not manhandling him since I'd immediately be found at fault. Then I gathered every ounce of proof I could, built a case and sued his @ss. We also hit him with 311 hazard reports and he got charged a ton for repairs, lead (it was one spot in the closet, but he was still charged). After about two months of back and forth, he acquiesced and settled out of court, giving us back the full last month and full security without charging us the cleaning fee.
Know the law people. Don't let anyone try to pull one over on you.
