I.B.S.  (Irritable Bruce Syndrome)

I’ll keep this short and sweet.  It seems like every day that I see someone on Facebook trashing some private citizen about some purely personal matter.  Let me just say this:  Doing so says more about the trash-or than it does the trash-ee.

Biofuel, esoteric numbers, and alleged fraud

U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett calls it the biggest fraud prosecution in Indiana history.  An 88 count indictment charges four men connected with a now-closed Middletown business, e-Biofuels, and others, of fraud at the $100 million level.

Much of the alleged misconduct involves RIN’s — renewable identication numbers associated with batches of “green” fuel.  A RIN is a 38 character code (count ’em, 38 characters; as a point of reference, remember that the entire U.S. population requires only nine figures) assigned to each batch of biofuel.  Here’s a chart that’ll make RIN’s easy to understand:

source:  www.ers.usda.gov

OK, so maybe I exaggerated the “easy to understand” part.

The Middletown boys are accused, among other things, of re-using RIN’s.  Who’da thunk that this byzantine regulatory framework might provide a platform for alleged fraud?

LIFE IMITATES LAWYER JOKES

The old joke goes like this:

A lawyer died and arrived at the pearly gates. To his dismay, there were thousands of people ahead of him in line to see St. Peter. But, to his surprise, St. Peter left his desk at the gate and came down the long line to where the lawyer was standing. St. Peter greeted him warmly. Then St. Peter and one of his assistants took the lawyer by the hands and guided him up to the front of the line into a comfortable chair by his desk.

The lawyer said, “I don’t mind all this attention, but what makes me so special?”

St. Peter replied, “Well, I’ve added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you must be about 193 years old!”

MEANWHILE, IN THE REAL WORLD:

An Ohio lawyer who billed for lengthy work days on court-appointed cases, including one that stretched for 29 hours, is facing a disciplinary proceeding.

However, Ben Swift did the work and just needed to keep better records, his lawyer told the Dayton Daily News.

An audit showed that he had billed for days that included 29 hours of work, 23 hours of work, 21.5 hours of work and 21 hours of work.

MULTITASKING LAWYER OF THE WEEK

In an effort to restore some dignity to this blog, we offer Exhibit A from our file of multi-tasking lawyers:  Jerry Springer.

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