What’s troubling is that we don’t have a good way to know how often this behavior actually occurs. Would the IRS have found the missing data if there hadn’t been press about it? I suppose that depends on your outlook and level of skepticism.

Or, put another way, I once asked my father if the state of political corruption in the news had always been as dour as what we see today. He said that this was the worst during his lifetime.

I then asked if he thought that the state of world affairs was actually worse, or if technology had simply made it more well known. He was silent for a long time before he answered. He said that he hadn’t considered that.

Finally, when I was a teen I was frustrated when I was lectured after I got caught sneaking out in the night. My mother, with a healthy degree of smug satisfaction, told me that she was always one step ahead of me. I couldn’t throw it in her face that I got away with it on a regular basis, of course.

You must assume that when you catch someone behaving badly once then there may be other incidents that you didn’t recognize. The worst aspect of corruption is not the time that we found out about it. It’s the question of how much we’ve missed.