dmoore1998
Eagle Member
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2021
- Messages
- 962
I disagree. Claiming to catch a person lying is one of the strengths of the internet. Creating drama with unverified/unverifiable accusations is one of the strengths of the internet.
In any competition settings there is always someone that is unhappy about something. Giving that person/people tools to create headaches for a TD they decided is the cause of them being disgruntled is a way of life for some.
As far as catching a bad TD actually lying? I doubt it would be as obvious as you think. There are explicit items that either match or they do not (pro-payouts). It's all the things that underlie a tournament that are vague costs. How much did the TD pay for the players pack versus how much the claimed value is? The porta johns, the water buckets, the gas receipts, the signage, etc.
I haven't run events, but this thread got me thinking about the numbers--if someone wants to impart more accuracy to these numbers, please do.
You've got an event that has a total cash flow of $10-20k. Of that, only a fraction might be in the areas where additional transparency is being sought. Move the numbers around by 10% and how are you or anyone else going to know if that's right? Is a bag of ice $5 or $5.50? How many bags was that? 10,000 feet of OB rope...oh wait, most of that was leftover or re-use from a previous event. It's listed in the financials, but did you actually check the receipts?
A real and meaningful audit looking at the documentation would be required to "easily" catch the cheaters and even then it is questionable whether you could reasonably assert that someone pushed the numbers by a few (say 10) percent here and there. Throw in a few gas and meal receipts and you've moved the discretionary spending by 100's of dollars.
1. If you're running an event with $20k in cash flow, you should absolutely already be doing all of the tracking of expenses, etc. So any previous arguments about how hard it is don't really fly.
2. 100% you can fudge a few bucks for "ice bags". You can probably also get a free meal out of the deal. That's almost definitely not what people care about though. If you tell me you ordered me a takeout meal and my cost is $20...I don't care that it actually cost $19.10 and you just pocketed $.90...I do care if you told me it was $20 but it was $10 and you scammed half my money.
3. Your OB rope example is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's going to be super obvious to folks in the DG community if a TD says "I had to buy 10,000 feet of OB rope" and the local players are immediately like "no you didn't, you re-used the same rope you used last year". Or "I had to pay $3,000 for port-a-johns" and someone says "show us the receipts, that's not remotely what it costs for port-a-john rental".