The firemen in our county have been under investigation for what amounts to theft. Supervisors would authorize sick time for employees who weren't really "sick" and then send callbacks to boost overtime pay for other firemen who reciprocated the favor. Today, the county commissioner announced that their pensions will be cut. In other words, they won't suffer any real punishments. They didn't earn the higher pensions anyway. They stole this time from the system, and in essence they stole money from every one of us.
Unless the punishment fits the crime, the next crop of people in any vocation will repeat the tricks of the prior one. Fire some firemen, and some of the supervisors who authorized it for that matter, or else they will try again. Maybe somewhere else, maybe a year or a decade from now, they will swing back and try this again. Next time, like last time, they might get away with it. If they cheated the system, they committed a crime; if the new rules reduced sick leave filings, then someone was frauding the government which means they frauded you. Sick relatives are not sick self, and that does not give you the right to take sick leave. If enough of the firemen did it and their supervisors knew it, that could amount to racketiering, which is a crime investigated by the FBI. It's fraud, and quite frankly, I protest this kind of shenanigen.
The only way to prevent recidivism is to remove the problem. Fire the firemen who tried to cheat us, the taxpayers, and replace them with people who do the job because they like it, they like to serve, or they like the lifestyle, not just people who do it for the money. If your punishment is nothing more than removing the ill-gotten gain, what prevents them from cheating us again? Firing firemen might not stop it completely, but those particular firemen won't cheat us again, because they'll be doing something else for a living.
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