We should be daily on guard against our instinctive presumption that what we asked to pay for something equates in anyway to what it is worth. By the time the seller has added on his profit, made allowance for stocking space and expected rate of turnover, the distributor has taken off his slice for double handling, storage waiting for and then transporting, and, assuming there are no middlemen taking a slice before handing on, the prime producer has to cover the advertising, product packaging, verification of standards met, recoup his product design, plant rightoff and premises, insurance against adverse events, stocking levels only then do we get to the nitty gritty, the payroll to produce and the purchase and stocking of the raw materials;finally we get close to the 'value' of the product.
We expect an intimate relationship between what we pay for something and it what it costs in terms of labour and raw materials, yet what is costs actually is ethereal. A figure derived from gut or more probably prior experience of what degree of ancillary costs can be born by the expected market, and still sell and still make a profit. It has a lot closer relationship to the vagaries of house selling, what does the market bear or expect for this size house in this location. Pricing is not hard wired to actual costs but is pitched at market expectations and precedences.
This divorce from the actual cost of things is not just about the products we buy, but as I have explored previously in Government Savings, it is also true of the cost of how we choose to manage and administer ourselves. The 'cost' of government is not a balance sheet figure derived from what it takes to run or administer a set of procedures but reflects a historic norm. This is what has been relied on in the past to produce this end result and that with these adjustments this what it costs us now.
We got here for a sliding progression of perfectly reasonable and at the time right and fully justifiable choices. Right here and now being required to pay what others expect is their due and entitlement just does not seem right. Clearly we cannot go back to barter. Can you imagine the furore at the Supermarket as we all came in with our trade goods to exchange for our weekly shop. Equally we just cannot make and keep contact with the worldwide spread of sources and suppliers to individually barter an exchange for all those everyday items we now so desperately depend. Yet we have to get back to making some connection to what it actually costs, for something, as against what the marketplace thiks it can get away with.
I take heart from EBay. There is a model here, the dutch auction, products are offered at an optimum price then, depending on stock levels, degrees of demand and closeness to spoiling date, the price decreases until the consumers decides that it is worth it. Services might operate in an inverse way, with the rate for the service increasing until some provider snaps it up. Quality is the bug bear, we know only too well how the supermarkets dumb down the specification until it is a pale shadow of its former, introductory, self. With the growth of consumer feedback and instant consumer vitriol when things are wrong, maybe there is is this growing tool that will keep suppliers and providers sharp on their toes. Maybe, just maybe they can claim back from the domineering supermarkets, accountability for the what they provide. That would be the dawn of a new age.
Showing posts with label budget savins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label budget savins. Show all posts
Tuesday, 5 February 2013
Saturday, 8 January 2011
Finding the Fraud
The hardest bias to eliminate in proving a scientific theory is that of prior expectation. The researcher, knowing what he expects to see, will find it within the data, when another unbiased person would not. It skews the results, unfavourably. No proof is certain until another, remote uninvolved, institute has replicated it. All very pragmatic, detached and objective way of assessing and limiting the errors of our human vulnerabilities.
How come then when we have a need to overhaul the disability financial support allowances, it is prefaced with that statement that twenty percent savings are to be achieved in the process! If you are starting out on a major policy procedural revue, the last thing you want to do is to cloud your starting point with prejudiced presumptions based on nothing more than speculation, hearsay and the roar of the crowd. Any manager worth their salt would say first off, sort out your facts, know your starting position and be very clear what your goal is, keep it clear and simple.
But then it does not matter about being rigorous in our approach because these are only disabled people with no clout or large well of support. It does not matter then if the threat of yet another fraud seeking investigation puts each and every one on suspicion; each has yet again to go through the humiliating hoop of proving the self-evident that they are unable to cope as well as a 'normal' person; suffer the indignities of some disinterested investigator putting them through meaningless tests that might never in a million years expose the real handicaps they have to struggle and cope with which may actually take insight and compassion to begin to understand and, to cap it off, have there noses rubbed in the social smear yet again that they are dependant on support and help and they are not free agents to do what they want, when they want it.
The justification for all this is there is blatant fraud going on and our country needs to make huge savings inorder to survive let alone recover from the brink of financial ruin. Surely everyone would willingly want to play their part. If only we were all of equal stature.
Rather than harangue the claimants for their suspected misuse of the rules and forms prescribed for them to follow, equally the blame could be placed at the feet of the managers. Let us investigate these lax managers that allow frauds or false claims to be made, unchallenged and do not tighten up procedures or guidance to minimise the scope for abuse of the systems. Lets sack the managers with high claim records and make all the savings that way!.
This is where the heart of the problem lays. It is yet another example of the systematic failings of centralised control, remote form the actual interface, that just cannot devise questions, rules and procedures capable of coping or defining the infinitely wide range of human responses and conditions out there across the whole spectrum of humanity. Even if the impossible was achievable it would then only become the next target to prove that the defined is well short of limits of human ingenuity. What we expect as our social right is rough justice. Not exactly equal to everyone, nor exactly equal wherever or however, just lumped together, across the board, a rough parity can be seen. This requires a human commonsense interface, flexible, adjustable, empowered to apply discretion, compassionate and above all accountable.
Our national effort and technology should put its muscle here where it can be really useful. To provide comparators, to example best practice or to alert to weakness and excesses. Provide good, robust and understandable on demand support but leaving the human agents to make those thousand and one incomparable comparisons, applying their skills to balance the dissimilarities. That is what our brains are good at. The bottom line is what rule, question or procedure can define just how much personal effort is necessary to overcome a weakness. None, it is a piece of string exercise and only the human interface can judge when enough is enough and some help will go a long way.
Who ever signed off on this initiative deserves to be taken out into the street and shot in front of the cameras, no trial, no judge, no jury just let presumption, prejudice and sentiment decide.
How come then when we have a need to overhaul the disability financial support allowances, it is prefaced with that statement that twenty percent savings are to be achieved in the process! If you are starting out on a major policy procedural revue, the last thing you want to do is to cloud your starting point with prejudiced presumptions based on nothing more than speculation, hearsay and the roar of the crowd. Any manager worth their salt would say first off, sort out your facts, know your starting position and be very clear what your goal is, keep it clear and simple.
But then it does not matter about being rigorous in our approach because these are only disabled people with no clout or large well of support. It does not matter then if the threat of yet another fraud seeking investigation puts each and every one on suspicion; each has yet again to go through the humiliating hoop of proving the self-evident that they are unable to cope as well as a 'normal' person; suffer the indignities of some disinterested investigator putting them through meaningless tests that might never in a million years expose the real handicaps they have to struggle and cope with which may actually take insight and compassion to begin to understand and, to cap it off, have there noses rubbed in the social smear yet again that they are dependant on support and help and they are not free agents to do what they want, when they want it.
The justification for all this is there is blatant fraud going on and our country needs to make huge savings inorder to survive let alone recover from the brink of financial ruin. Surely everyone would willingly want to play their part. If only we were all of equal stature.
Rather than harangue the claimants for their suspected misuse of the rules and forms prescribed for them to follow, equally the blame could be placed at the feet of the managers. Let us investigate these lax managers that allow frauds or false claims to be made, unchallenged and do not tighten up procedures or guidance to minimise the scope for abuse of the systems. Lets sack the managers with high claim records and make all the savings that way!.
This is where the heart of the problem lays. It is yet another example of the systematic failings of centralised control, remote form the actual interface, that just cannot devise questions, rules and procedures capable of coping or defining the infinitely wide range of human responses and conditions out there across the whole spectrum of humanity. Even if the impossible was achievable it would then only become the next target to prove that the defined is well short of limits of human ingenuity. What we expect as our social right is rough justice. Not exactly equal to everyone, nor exactly equal wherever or however, just lumped together, across the board, a rough parity can be seen. This requires a human commonsense interface, flexible, adjustable, empowered to apply discretion, compassionate and above all accountable.
Our national effort and technology should put its muscle here where it can be really useful. To provide comparators, to example best practice or to alert to weakness and excesses. Provide good, robust and understandable on demand support but leaving the human agents to make those thousand and one incomparable comparisons, applying their skills to balance the dissimilarities. That is what our brains are good at. The bottom line is what rule, question or procedure can define just how much personal effort is necessary to overcome a weakness. None, it is a piece of string exercise and only the human interface can judge when enough is enough and some help will go a long way.
Who ever signed off on this initiative deserves to be taken out into the street and shot in front of the cameras, no trial, no judge, no jury just let presumption, prejudice and sentiment decide.
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