Tumgik
#nursing homes
gwydionmisha · 7 months
Text
CW: Elder Abuse.
67 notes · View notes
Text
KPMG audits the nursing homes it advises on how to beat audits
Tumblr media
Tomorrow (May 10), I’m in VANCOUVER for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall and on Thurs (May 11), I’m in CALGARY for Wordfest.
Tumblr media
Auditors are capitalism’s lubricants, who keep the gears of finance capital smoothly a-whirl, allowing investors to move their money in and out of companies without having to go pore over their books and walk through their facilities. Without auditors, the gears of capitalism would grind themselves to dust:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/09/dingo-babysitter/#maybe-the-dingos-ate-your-nan
Unfortunately for capitalism, auditing is irredeemably broken. The Big Four auditors (PWC, EY, Deloitte and KPMG) have merged to monopoly, becoming “too big to fail” and “too big to jail.” These four gigantic firms have spun up fantastically lucrative “consulting” divisions that advise companies on how to cheat on their audits and attain incredible (paper) gains. The work of these “consultants” is worth far more than the accounting and auditing jobs the companies do, and the weaker the audits are, the more profitable the consulting is:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/04/aaronsw/#crooked-ref
This crisis has been a long time brewing. Back in 2001, the accounting/consulting giant Arthur Andersen was at the center of Enron’s fraud, which lit $11B in shareholder capital on fire. Enron had been making everyday people angry for years, engineering rolling blackouts and incredible energy-price gouging, but no one cares about working peoples’ complaints. By contrast, stealing $11B from rich people was something the authorities couldn’t ignore. They gave Andersen the death penalty, trying to teach the surviving accounting firms a lesson about what happens when you fuck with plutes.
But those other firms learned the wrong lesson: the collapse of Andersen was so disruptive that it soon became clear that the authorities would never take another giant consulting firm down, no matter how egregious its conduct was. They doubled down on crime, and then doubled down again.
It’s hard to pick a winner in the Big Four Accounting Firm Corruption Olympics, but KPMG is a strong contender, with a long history of just being monumentally inept and wrong. Back when Enron was unspooling, KPMG devoted itself to threatening people who linked to its website “without a license to do so”:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020207141547/http://chris.raettig.org/email/jnl00040.html
A couple years later, they declared war on wifi, trying to convince normies that wireless networks were an existential risk to human civilization:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2885339.stm
But there’s not much money in wifi scare stories or licenses to link. KPMG are good dialectical materialists, devoted to money over ideology, and boy did they figure out some wild ways to make money. For one thing, they figured out that they could get more accountants certified by cheating…on ethics exams:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-kpmg-cheating-scandal-was-much-more-widespread-than-originally-thought-2019-06-18
KPMG’s top managers bribed regulators to give them the answer-sheets for ethics exams. What did they bribe those public employees with? Jobs at KPMG:
https://www.pogo.org/investigation/2020/01/how-accountants-took-washingtons-revolving-door-to-a-criminal-extreme
There’s hardly a month that goes by without another KPMG scandal somewhere in the world, with enormous monetary and social fallout. During the lockdowns, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government outsourced the creation and maintenance of ArriveCAN (a contact tracing app for people who entered Canada) to a grifter called GC Strategies, who billed millions for their services. GC Strategies didn’t do any work — instead, they paid KPMG $1,000-$1,500 day to hire freelancers to build the app. The app itself was a catastrophic failure, and that failure didn’t just embarrass the government — it also failed to protect Canadians during a once-in-a-century global pandemic. KPMG raked off a 30% commission:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/31/mckinsey-and-canada/#comment-dit-beltway-bandits-en-canadien
In the USA, KPMG helped Microsoft work up a radioactively illegal tax-evasion scheme. Microsoft poured the millions it saved by cheating on its taxes into dark-money operations that lobbied to defund the IRS so that KPMG and Microsoft could cook up even more illegal tax-evasion schemes:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher
But KPMG doesn’t content itself with screwing over everyday people and rotting our democratic institutions — it also engages in the dangerous business of helping billionaires steal from millionaires. KPMG was the auditor that signed off on the scam “oil company” Miller Energy Partners, a fraud that operated for years thanks to KPMG’s rubber-stamp on its crooked books:
https://www.desmog.com/2021/06/03/miller-energy-kpmg-auditors-oil-fraud/
The company was run by serial fraudsters with long rapsheets for stealing millions. They staffed their C-suite with executives from disgraced companies that had been busted for running Ponzi schemes, issuing press releases praising those execs’ “proven track records in raising capital.” KPMG ignored every red flag, ignored the hundreds of millions in fraud on the books — and when the whole thing came crashing down, the responsible KPMG partner kept his job for years, until retiring with a full and fat pension.
More recently, KPMG made millions by confidently certifying the stability of a large regional bank, assuring investors and depositors that it was managing its risk and could be trusted. The name of the client that KPMG was so bullish on will be familiar to you: Silicon Valley Bank:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/kpmg-faces-scrutiny-for-audits-of-svb-and-signature-bank-42dc49dd
KPMG epitomizes the idea of Too Big To Fail and Too Big to Jail. Despite being at the center of virtually every major finance scandal, it continues to thrive and grow. Remember the Carillion bust, in which billions went up in smoke and swathes of privatized government services vanished overnight? Not only did KPMG sign off on fraudulent Carillion books, but it escaped fines for doing so — and got paid to help administer Carillion’s bankruptcy:
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/uk-watchdog-fines-kpmg-24-mln-over-carillion-regenersis-audits-2022-07-25/
Despite this, KPMG continues to find willing buyers for its services. After all, when the sector is dominated by four giant, lavishly corrupt firms, there’s not much choice in the matter:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/29/great-andersens-ghost/#mene-mene-bezzle
This is bad news for the investor class, of course, but it’s even worse news for the people who rely on the services that KPMG certifies, even as it helps grifters destroy them. Every kind of business relies on audits, from transit to aviation to day-care to eldercare.
Here’s a scary one for you: in Australia, the job of auditing residential eldercare homes’ compliance with safety and anti-abuse rules has been outsourced to KPMG. While KPMG earns a mid-sized fortune from these audits, it earns far more advising the owners of residential aged care homes on how to beat those audits:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/04/firm-performing-australian-aged-care-audit-also-charging-providers-for-expertise
KPMG says that the division that ensures the safety and dignity of elderly people is firewalled off from the division that advises companies on how to spend as little as possible on that safety and dignity — but KPMG also went to great lengths to keep the fact that it was selling services to both sides a secret.
Once the secret got out, an anonymous KPMG spokesmonster said, “When considering a request to perform an audit, we undertake a detailed process to ensure the engagement is free of conflicts.”
It’s hypothetically possible that this is true, but anyone who believes anything KPMG says is a sucker. The company’s rap-sheet goes back decades. This is, after all, a company that cheated on its ethics exams.
Tumblr media
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!
Tumblr media Tumblr media
[Image ID: Two business-suited male figures seen side on; each has a bomb for a head, and each is holding a lit lighter that has ignited the other's fuse. Each bomb is wearing a green accountant's eyeshade. In the background is a fiery mushroom cloud. They wear KPMG logos on their lapels.]
Tumblr media
Image:
Vectorportal.com (modified) https://vectorportal.com/vector/business-deal-illustration/23215
CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Inspired by an illustration by Matt Kenyon for the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/07184d86-81cf-11e2-b050-00144feabdc0
24 notes · View notes
fungi-funguy · 5 months
Text
Caring For The Elderly
Reading an article by Vox about the crisis regarding care for older adults, and while I knew a lot of this, there's information I think more people should know.
(Article: "Baby boomers are aging. Their kids aren’t ready.")
A lot of Millennials, Gen X, and Gen Z are having to care for their parents. Our country isn't set up in the same way that it was when the Baby Boomers were born, and it's affecting their care as well as the entire family structure.
"By 2030, the US will for the first time have more residents over 65 than children. Someone turning 65 today has a 70 percent chance of needing long-term care at some point, and 20 percent will need it for more than five years."
"Medicare doesn’t cover most long-term care, and seniors only become eligible for care through Medicaid when they have almost no assets left. [...] the median annual cost of a full-time home health aide was nearly $60,000 in 2021, while a semi-private room in a nursing home ran $94,000 per year or more."
"To remedy the financial, mental, and physical health crisis facing boomers and their children, experts say improved paid leave is crucial. Caregivers can take unpaid time off under the Family Medical Leave Act, but without a salary, many can’t afford to."
The article also talks about the substantial gaps in Medicaid coverage, especially in regards to long-term care.
There are a lot of stories shared from the perspective of caregivers who are completely at a loss due to how little help the world offers. Mental and emotional strains due to working full-time jobs, combined with caring for one or more elderly parent, is increasing the stress levels in the younger populations. It's leading to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and heart disease.
If you're caring for an older family member, please remember that there is support out there in your community. If you aren't, please fight for better care for the elderly in these situations.
If you know someone who is a caregiver, please offer them whatever support you can.
And also, please remember to treat the elderly as the people they are. They're humans too, and they aren't some sort of monolith of pure evil rhetoric or something. They're people. And the forgetting of that information is half of why we have this crisis today.
8 notes · View notes
Video
MEEMAW NO
78 notes · View notes
whilomm · 3 months
Text
listened to a podcast that I think other ppl here may find interesting, 99pi ep 557: model village
(note: the article is a lot shorter than the podcast, and doesnt go into as much detail, so I would defo rec ether listening or reading the transcript, which is linked in the little paper button in the header)
it goes over a newer type of dememtia/alzheimers care to contrast the typical sterile, medicalized, institutionalized nursing home care thats kinda the norm. Its slowly been spreading to more places, but it started with this one place and well, just look at it!
Tumblr media
The podcast goes into detail about all of the different design philosophy built into the spaces, from smaller details to avoiding patterns on surfaces which tend to confuse dementia patients to bigger things like designing a money-less grocery store so that residents can go on grocery runs and just kinda live normal lives.
it also talks about how we started to fear mental degradation suddenly, seeing it as this horrible disease that if we pour enough money into science we can cure it and eliminate any need for the peoples care, while also. not putting much money at all into making sure the ppl living with it could have happy, comfortable lives instead of just shoving them into a sterile institution "for their safety", and the overall dehumanization of dementia/alzheimers patients that contributed to no one really seeing it as a problem that there was no dignity in these institutions, cause its a "funeral that never ends".
anyway if anyone wants to see what these institutions COULD look like if designed with more care for the people, check it out
3 notes · View notes
disableism · 2 years
Text
I dread the day Sis can no longer care for me at home. My insurance pays out roughly $800 a month for my home care, all of which she puts right back into supporting me. And she does tons of extra stuff she isn’t paid for. When I get worse (or Sis gets too old) I won’t be able to live at home anymore. The system actively works against disabled people staying in their own homes, after all. & I can guarantee I’ll be way too young for a nursing home when it happens to me. It definitely shouldn’t have to happen to Alice Wong yet. Listen, if I’ve ever taught you a single thing about disability rights, chances are I (directly or indirectly) learned it from Alice. She won’t be able to keep up the fight for disability justice if she is forced into a nursing home. Plus, most importantly, she *wants* to stay at home, of course she does. Please, let’s help her out! She needs some time to get back her strength. That’ll never happen in a home. She deserves better. For all she’s done for us. Keep fighting, Alice!
84 notes · View notes
chargetheintruder · 1 year
Text
This is just sad, but I have to mention it.
Because this just plain SHOWS YOU how America treats our most frail, poor and downtrodden. We show up, do the LEAST and then refuse to change a thing, for DECADES. Read this. Read the whole thing. This is happening NOW in the 21st century, so yeah, if you have a conscience you either need to be angry or deeply ashamed, if not both.
The short of it is, if you end up elderly and too frail (from bad health) to live on your own, you go in a nursing home on Medicaid. A condition of this is that ALL income you have goes towards the nursing home bill, and you ONLY get a monthly allowance. That allowance is expected to cover everything from new clothes and shoes to denture supplies to the occasional vending-machine grade snack, for a whole month. It started at $25 a month in 1972 and was only raised ONCE in to $30 in 1987. Those are minimums: a few states have raised it to $40 but not much more. Alaska has raised theirs the most--and keep in mind that this is ALASKA we're talking about here, where warm clothes are at a premium for everyone. You would expect the northern-most state of the Union, and the one with the most spare petroleum money, and the least population, to do more.
But the point is that most of our most impoverished and frail elderly live in deliberate and mandated EXTREME want. These are people who can't afford a pen and paper to write letters home with. They can't afford their own toothbrushes and toothpaste (or denture goods that work). They're basically forced into beggary for every last thing at the end of their lives.
And you wonder why some people choose to die instead of living like that. This shit's depressing even for someone younger to deal with. I get that. But this really and truly shows you how cheap and back-biting America has become. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a fuck. If we did we would have done right by these people in the first fucking place, instead of doing the LEAST and letting conservatives ruin that.
Yes, other people suffer similar kinds of mandated poverty in the United States. I'm not here to invalidate any of that. I'm just pointing out one of the most extreme versions of a phenomenon that America really needs to give up on. We really need to stop trying so hard to betray and destroy our own people.
16 notes · View notes
caregiversherry · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media
Ask someone with dementia to draw themselves and you’ll be surprised what you get. Here are 5 self portraits from different residents at work.
2 notes · View notes
clatterbane · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
Almost surprised it's taken them this long to ramp these policies back up, tbqh.
A little more context:
Much too little of a reckoning, and far too late. So, now they are evidently trying to pull basically the same shit again--under the very possibly too-correct assumption that nobody else has many fucks to give over what happens to elderly and disabled people.
8 notes · View notes
pikaglove · 2 years
Text
When I get mad at my parents for how they treated me, I start looking up the worst reviewed nursing homes in my area so that way, I can make sure they go to one that's really bad!
22 notes · View notes
bookwormchocaholic · 1 year
Text
There's nothing like having simultaneous outbreaks of scabies and mersa, with a little bit of covid thrown in the mix.
9 notes · View notes
redshift-13 · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
https://twitter.com/YasminRafiei/status/1562744217167835136
13 notes · View notes
sportsandlaughs · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media
3 notes · View notes
caregivervent · 1 year
Text
Want to die at home? Start saving now
If you’ve followed The Memories Project blog for awhile, you know that helping families understand the complexities of dying at home is an important issue to me. I wrote an essay on the topic that went viral on The Caregiver Space: Why dying at home isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Recently I read another essay that addressed the sobering financial costs that a family can incur to honor a…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
2 notes · View notes
infographicjournal · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Infection Control and Support are Needed in Nursing Homes
Having trouble reading infographic here?
Check out the full size infographic at - https://infographicjournal.com/infection-control-and-support-are-needed-in-nursing-homes/
5 notes · View notes
lamajaoscura · 1 year
Link
2 notes · View notes