Gene Keyes waited outside Maggie Reynolds’ office on the first business day of the New Year. He had spent the last ten days confirming his data and validating his conclusions. Well, he could be honest with himself. He had done all that in the first two days, and then spent eight days cooling his heels waiting for anyone in the damn company to get back from holiday vacation.
Gene glanced at his watch, saw that it was five minutes to eight, and resumed waiting with only the smallest of sighs. Maggie, a member of the Finance department, assigned to the Procurement group, had authorized several of the charges. So the first action he planned to take was to confirm the data with Maggie in person. He had brought his paper file showing the unusual expenditures: a thick accordion folder, nearly bursting. He wished he could have escalated the issue when he’d found it in the first place, but the established process for investigating these things required him to complete at least a first round of discussions with people who had handled the transactions.
At eight, he saw Maggie approaching carrying a coffee cup in one hand, with a large purse in her other. As she got closer, her face turned puzzled as she realized that Gene was waiting outside her office door.
“Hello?” she asked, turning it into a question. She paused outside the door.
“I’m Gene Keyes. You came to my office for help a few weeks ago.”
She nodded.
“I’m investigating some irregularities in purchase orders since I last saw you.”
“Oh.” She paused, still holding her coffee cup in one hand and purse dangling from the other. “Oh,” she said again, more sharply. “What can I do for you?”
“Can we go into your office and sit down?” Gene gestured toward her door with the accordion folder.
“Of course, of course,” Maggie said hurriedly. She handed her coffee cup to Gene, and then swiped her ID badge to unlock the door. “Come in.”
Gene looked around as they entered the office. Clean, organized. He put the coffee cup down on her desk.
Maggie went around her desk, then sat down, sitting straight upright, looking like a student trying to impress a teacher. “What is it? Did I sign something I shouldn’t have?”
“I am hoping you can explain it to me.” Gene methodically took a seat, put his accordion folder in front of him, and took out a single page, the sheet rasping against the other tightly bound papers.
Maggie nervously fiddled with her hair.
“Does this look familiar?” Gene finally asked, putting the page in front of Maggie. “It’s from Gary Mitchell’s division. You can see there are multiple purchases. It starts with these charges for the ELOPe project. Then, over the course of the next two weeks, there are thirty four more purchase orders that were outside the normal expenditure range for Mitchell’s expenses. Furthermore, the billing is highly irregular in that they are split across multiple accounts.”
“I do remember this,” Maggie said, her hands shaking slightly as she took the printout. “Oh, I’m so sorry if I did anything wrong. I was concerned about the purchases when I first saw them. But I talked to John Anderson in Procurement about them. He said they were normal end of the year behavior because departments usually try to spend the leftover money in their budget.”
“That’s true, but not like this. You can see that the expenditures are distributed against dozens of budgets. This one charge…” Gene paused to remove more paper from his briefcase, this set of printouts showing how the charges were allocated to project budgets. Gene found the relevant line item, pointed it out on the print out, and continued, “This one charge is distributed against forty-nine accounts. You see, not only are they spending all the money left in their budgets, but they’re also ensuring that each expenditure doesn’t take more than one million from any one account — that would trigger an executive level review of the expense.” Gene paused to study Maggie.
“Sounds like someone deliberately manipulating the system to avoid being detected,” Maggie answered. She leaned forward, and started tracing through the print out with one finger. She went quickly through several pages, unconscious of Gene’s scrutiny.
“That’s right.” Gene paused to extract another set of papers from his folder. “Here’s another little bit of odd behavior.” Gene turned the papers around and slid them across the desk. “By the end of this reporting period, each budget has exactly one penny left in it.”
“That’s really bizarre,” Maggie said, her eyes bulging. “A penny? How did whoever did this get the budgets to come out so precisely?” Maggie pawed through the rest of the papers, swiftly going down the rows of purchases. “The individual charges are generally tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” she mused out loud. “Spending precisely the right amount of money to bring the totals in to exactly that amount… Well, it seems impossible.”
“What is even more unusual,” Gene said, “is why they would do that. Whoever did this was smart enough to stay under the one million dollar limit in a single budget line item, knowing that would trigger the alert I mentioned. And in addition, they were smart enough to keep each account under budget, knowing that even hitting the budget would trigger another alert.”
Maggie laughed. “That’s true. There are emails from Finance every fiscal quarter about the repercussions of exceeding budgets or going over a million dollars. Anyone in the company who reads their email would know not to exceed their budget, or they would get chewed out by their Finance representative.”
“Then why would they try to spend every last penny but one?” Gene sat back. Gene liked hard data, but his gut was telling him that Maggie wasn’t in on whatever the deception was.
“It is contradictory,” Maggie said. “Smart enough to avoid any of the standard alerts, and yet foolish enough to create a suspicious pattern.”
They both paused for a moment and looked at each other.
“Gene, I don’t know what to tell you,” Maggie continued on, after a minute spent in reflection. “I agree, the picture you are painting looks suspicious, but I never saw anything unusual in the course of processing these requests. They were mostly for servers, additional hard drives and computer memory, contractors to service them, stuff like that. Nothing out of the ordinary for Gary’s department. Granted, they seemed so innocuous that after the first few, I just rubber stamped them.”
Gene watched Maggie sit back, her face apologetic, but her body posture relaxed and confident. It wasn’t Maggie, he thought to himself. “Is it typical for Gary Mitchell to approve all the purchases himself?” Gene asked out loud. “I see very few cases where he delegates purchasing authority.”
“Yes, that’s normal for Gary. Are you thinking that Gary is responsible?”
“The fact that Gary personally authorized all these orders makes him the first person I’d look at. But…” Gene trailed off.
“But?”
Gene pulled a fourth set of papers from his accordion folder. “It turns out that the same behavior is happening in another department. The Offshore Data Center project. Their expenditures exhibit some of the same characteristics. Multiple line items just under one million dollars, budgets coming in at just under one penny less than their limit.”
“But that’s not under Gary?”
“No, it’s not. Which makes it more likely that someone has hacked Avogadro’s procurement system.”
“But to what purpose?” Maggie asked. She scanned the papers again. “Why would someone risk their job and even jail to order servers, satellite communication systems, and hire contractors? It makes no sense.”
“I agree,” Gene said. “I was hoping that you would be able to shed some light on this, and that maybe there would be an easy answer.” He began to pick up his papers and put them back into the accordion folder. “I’m going to keep investigating this. Please don’t discuss it with anyone.”
Maggie nodded.
Gene stood up. “Thanks for your time, Maggie.” He let himself out, leaving Maggie full of questions.
From the time Mike arrived at the airport in Madison for the flight home, and periodically since he arrived back in Portland, he had tried to reach David by phone. Frustratingly, David had been off the grid in New Mexico. Mike knew that David always went to Christine’s family ranch for the holidays, and he knew that the ranch was off the grid, so he couldn’t claim any legitimate reason for feeling even more suspicious. Yet here he was, feeling manipulated by a software algorithm.
