Great News From The Shutdown...
 

The United States Department of Commerce sent me a mandatory Survey of Business Owners. It's the worst form of bureaucratic time wasting, where some empty suit in Washington DC decided it's a good idea to have business owners waste an hour of their time filling out online forms that rarely get used for anything worthwhile, or often are politicized into skewed 'reports' by think-tanks to suit their own agendas. Because it's mandatory I set aside some time today to complete the forms...

Then I see this... :1orglaugh

http://outage.census.gov/closed.html

That is awesome. There is a pretty hefty fine for not doing it. I hope they waive that and not require us to go back when they get their shit together

The United States is utterly fucking amazing. Yeah, there is some bullshit out there. But I just read an article about how government employee on furlough because of this shut down are... Spending their free time volunteering in soup kitchens cooking for the poor in Washington DC.

Think about that for a second.

It makes sense since many of those same workers will soon need those soup kitchens as guests rather than providers. :(

You beat me to it.

They are just trying to put in some "sweat equity" just in case the line gets too long.

:1orglaugh

what does government "shut down" have to do with an online form working?
it's pretty damn lame that they shut stuff down on purpose...

And if the form gets hacked or anything else goes wrong at a time when the entire IT staff is on furlough....? The surveys are pointless to begin with, having them also become a liability due to a lack of security support would be awfully silly. :2 cents:

not sure about that, they had the same form for the past 10 years... I would think all the bugs would be worked out and someone made sure it's secure by now? but knowing how government works, they probably don't even host it themselves, but hired some company for $52M/year to manage it, $1M invoice for the past week isn't paid, so the form is shut down... :1orglaugh

Hopefully the idiotic census surveys go away as part of the shutdown deal... :thumbsup

That's kind of exactly my point.

Shutdown ended before the deadline to submit the survey.

So, I just wasted 20 minutes of my life answering mandatory questions like this one...

Do you work?
A) Less than 10 hours per week
B) 10-20 hours per week
C) 21 to 40 hours per week
D) More than 40 hours per week

There was no "E) 8 Days Per Week", which shows you right away how the Census Bureau and private business owner's mentality differ completely. :2 cents:

Bullshit. They are all going to get all their back pay, and there is no way that government will get any smaller until it crashes completely. They have nothing to worry about.



.

That survey was ridiculous. Our office manager spent hours, our accountant spent hours then it came to me and I read the pages of questions I was supposed to answer and tossed it in the garbage.. We took the fine.

How much was the fine? I've heard companies getting dinged for 3-5K in fines for failing to respond to a mandatory survey. Seems to me you can 'answer in 20 minutes' without any liability as long as the replies are 'intended to be truthful'. I figured 5K for 20 minutes works out to $250 a minute and went that route. Though it did feel a lot like being in grade school and having a teacher ask you to write "I will not talk in class" a thousand times. Pointless.

There must be different questionaires for different types of business. This was at least 40 pages. Our office manager told me $500 for the penalty.

Ahh yeah, with a fine of $12.50 per page, filing it in the trash makes good sense. The one they sent me was an online survey for small businesses... probably 15-20 pages long, but all point and click. Once I read that there was no liability for a good faith answer that might turn out to be incorrect, the survey took much less time. :winkwink:

Ah thanks for reminding me :(

I can tell you from experience the one audit you NEVER want to do is a HS/ICE I9 audit.
What a scam. We got fined $44,300 for not dotting I's and crossing T's. After nearly 3 months of our attorneys haggling with them they dropped the fine to $37,000.

When they hand delivered the *intent to fine* documents I asked the agent how they came up with a number like that. His answer was, that there is this matrix that they plug all the data in and out pops a fine. And people wonder why business people are not in love with the federal government.

My daughter is the HR director for a very large international company that employees thousands of people. Many of them are scientists from around the world, here on education or work visas. They go through these I9's inspections often and the fines they pay are unreal. Some have been in the over $1m range.

In a previous career I was involved with a major audit along those lines. The auditors completed their 'site inspection' work and were putting on their coats to leave when the company's own accountant decided to strike up a conversation with one of them about nonsense along the lines of 'so, how many audits do you guys do a week' as small talk.

It kept the auditors on site an extra 15-20 minutes while one of them chatted with the accountant and the others walked around looking things over while waiting to leave. The internal process to fire the company accountant was started the next day. No matter how clean your business is, when any auditor says 'Ok, I think we're all set, things look good' the only thing your company accountant should say is 'Thanks. Goodbye.' :2 cents:

I only mentioned I9's because that is a typical government money grab that people who aren't in business don't know exist. There are a lot of government agencies that do this.
EPA,DNR,ICE,OSHA,Workcomp bureau. There are probably more but these are ones that I have dealt with over the years. They all cost us money and in some cases a lot of it.