The Week in Meep: Finding the Missing Piece, Insurance Fraud, Museum Books and Art Selfies
Fight entropy! It's ultimately a losing battle, but fight the chaos!
Let’s get to it.
Meep, Fighter of Entropy
Last week was “ski week” for my son Diarmuid - that is, his school system takes the week of President’s Day off (unless there have been too many snow days.)
I’ve been taking D to the local library in the afternoon to enjoy the games, and I’ve been completing simple jigsaw puzzles.
Somebody had donated a bunch of these small jigsaw puzzles, many being duplicates of each other. The pieces were in Ziploc baggies inside the boxes, for convenience and to try to contain the chaos…
…but in one box there was a note, that a piece was missing, and exactly where in the puzzle the hole would appear. I put that box back. I chose a duplicate puzzle without such a note.
When I finished that one… there was an extra piece.
If you know anything about how these puzzles are manufactured, it will not surprise you to know it did not fit in my puzzle at all, but I could match it up to the picture in the placement where it was said to be missing in that note.
I updated the note.
I let the people at the library know what I had done (they provided the pencil for me to update the note in any case).
If it’s there the next time I go, I may test out the puzzle. But ski week is over.
Stories of Insurance Fraud
I listen to a lot of podcasts, coming in three broad categories: work-related/blog-related, Catholic, and general interesting stuff.
This one is work-related.
Alas, these stories of insurance fraud are not as wacky as the stories I had in my prior episodes of STUMP: Death & Taxes:
It’s far more prosaic and depressing: insurance brokers stealing from their customers or embezzling from their businesses in general.
But they do talk about a serious situation — the deliberate stealing of customers’ premiums by brokers, who then end up with no insurance coverage. This has to do with property and casualty coverage (homeowners/auto for personal, and a variety of business insurance coverages).
The podcast episode is engaging, as they start talking about this fraud… and then end up talking about meth labs (ok, not for long).
I laughed grimly when some wondered how some of the folks they knew who perpetrated some of this fraud and embezzlement managed to keep it up for a certain amount of time (the certain amount of time was not necessarily that long), even though these people were not necessarily that smart or great with numbers.
I have known something similar in the employee benefits world, where the money intended to be deposited for all sorts of employee benefits (not only insurance premiums but also unemployment taxes and retirement benefits deposits.) This was theft on a grand scale, and yes, it was prosecuted. There is no point in naming names, because it has happened more than once.
TPAs (third-party administrators) are companies that are supposed to handle this sort task, and when they become financially strained for a variety of reasons, they may steal the deposits they are entrusted to pass on to the other parties (insurance companies, governments, asset managers). The issue can be how rapidly the employers & employees discover the theft. Depending on the situation, it can be a federal criminal case.
Very illegal.
I will toss off one remark, because I said it to two different people this past week.
We all know that if such a TPA or even an employer takes employee pay withholdings intended for a 401(k) and does not deposit it, that’s a theft from the employee’s pay. That’s a crime. That would be a crime even if the employer were a government.
But if it’s about defined benefit pensions, and the employer is a government who undercontributes…. ho hum.
Well, I say that’s theft, too.
I got my Wadsworth books!
Last week, I mentioned an Edward Gorey exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum… and then noticed the Atheneum had the special exhibit catalog on sale… and several other books on sale! And an extra discount for museum members! (I’m a member, because of course I am.)
Here are my glorious books:
(The postcard in the middle was a thank you from the museum — all these books were on discount, probably because they’re trying to clear inventory.)
Of course, I love them all, and they’ve all got glorious detail.
Here’s a page from the Colt book:
I took a pic of that item on the bottom to challenge my friends some years ago, to see if they knew what it was. Yes, it’s part of the Wadsworth collection.
It’s from the Colt factory, of fused gun parts, after there had been a fire at the factory in 4 February 1864. There are a lot of Colt items in the Wadsworth collection, though they do not necessarily get a lot of display now, unfortunately. It is a part of Connecticut and U.S. history, and I’ll leave it there for now.
But to be a bit happier, I do recommend the general museum catalog, where they’ve helpfully put together their most compelling artworks and artifacts: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum Of Art: Uncommon Legacy — It is currently only $9.95 — what a deal! (and no, I don’t get a cut or anything).
So here’s the thing…
I’m a member of the Wadsworth, partly because it’s across the street from the office building where I used to go 5 days a week (who knows, I may be back again), and I used to hang out at the museum in my version of the smoke/coffee break.
And I like to take selfies with the art.
One I particularly like to take selfies with is the self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh they have:
A few more:
I hope to be going back in the spring….
Enjoy!
Are there any periodic auditing functions performed to deter this type of theft?