By his own admission he has the money for all of this in the first place. He's just trying to make things sound worse than they are to get more donations.
You bring up an important point. To powerlevel a bit, a big part of my college and professional education has included how to detect (or preferably prevent) fraud, embezzlement, and other forms of fiduciary misconduct. One of the most important elements to doing this is understanding the mindset behind white-collar theft.
Very few people consciously choose “steal shit” as a career choice, but there are a ton of thieves in the world, most of whom don’t consider themselves to be such. Let’s look at a relevant example of how somebody can go down this path.
(Note: I am using the Salvation Army as an example only because Lou claims to have worked for the Salvation Army. I have never worked for the Salvation Army and I have no knowledge of their actual internal control procedures. To whichever Salvation Army commander is googling around for possible defamatory forum shitposts: please do not threaten Null.)
Say you’re ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. Cash comes tumbling into the money pail all day long. The money pail has a lid with a little slot in it, the lid is held down tight with a padlock, and you don’t have the key because that would be fucking stupid. End of the day comes, your boss unlocks the money pail and tells you to count its contents.
If your chapter is doing shit properly, there are incredibly strict procedures that you will follow when doing this. Nobody should ever be fucking left alone with a pile of somebody else's cash and told to provide an unimpeachable total (ask retail checkout clerks what they hate about their job and they'll tell you it's when they have to explain a discrepancy between the money they counted and what the computer says should be in the till). This kind of money count should be performed by two people at minimum, in each other’s presence, and they should be rotated out frequently so they don’t start getting chummy and conspiring with each other. Once the count is done, they dual-sign all the paperwork, they fill out the bank slip, and they stuff it all into the night drop bag -- preferably one of the good deposit bags that's Kevlar-reinforced and has the zipper held in place by a push-down lock for which only the bank has a key. Larger organizations won't even risk sending someone out to make the deposit drop; if you ever go to the grocery store and see an armored Brinks truck idling out front, they're there to collect the dosh themselves and they're under serious contractual liability if the money doesn't all reach the bank intact.
(Those security firms also have specific measures in place to prevent a driver from simply riding off into the sunset when the truck is full. Money handling is a very stuffy career.)
If you're counting someone else's money, you
want strong internal controls like this to exist, because if a discrepancy ever occurs through no fault of your own, these controls will prove that it was impossible for you to have stolen shit. The alternative is someone else's mistake getting nailed indelibly to your ass because you were alone with the money.
Some charitable organizations or subchapters thereof, however, can get a bit lax. Maybe there's a volunteer shortage and you're told to count the money alone (this is grounds for threatening to walk off). Maybe there's a lot of commotion and confusion and everybody's too busy putting out fires to properly follow procedure (this is very common in shitty nonprofits.) Maybe there are no procedures at all (also common). Maybe everybody in the organization trusts that everybody else is a selfless little angel working solely for the greater good (and corruption is thus particularly rampant). Maybe you have a shower moment one evening when the procedures are playing through your mind on repeat, and you realize:
hey, that's a loophole. Maybe you have the key to the money pail, figuratively or perhaps even literally, and nobody fucking knows.
In any of these circumstances, money that's not yours is within your grasp. But you have integrity, and you know that stealing is wrong. So you don't touch the money. You don't look at the money. You don't even think about taking the money, because you're not a thief.
Yet. But the money is there. It's in reach. And eventually, your life story is going to hit a bad chapter. You're going to have a problem.
That problem could be anything. Maybe you got an IRS audit. Maybe your car broke down. Maybe a visitor used your otherwise-forgotten second bathroom and the toilet ran nonstop for a month and you got a massive water bill from the city. Maybe your brother showed up at your door in urgent need of help because of a nasty gambling debt that's coming due. Shit happens. Suddenly ends don't meet anymore. You're desperate. You've got a family to support. You've got to do something. You've got to find a solution.
Maybe there are good, legitimate solutions to your problem. Maybe there are ways to fix things and get back to normal. But you're panicking, you can't think straight, the problem would be solved if only you had a bit more money to spare,
and there's all this money flowing right past you all workday long, just waiting for you to reach a hand in and snatch up a fistful.
So you do it. You skim off a little cash, swearing to God that you'll return it all to its rightful owner as soon as you get the chance. Then you realize that returning the money would be dangerous, far more dangerous than stealing it had been. So you have a crisis of conscience. You lose a lot of sleep. You worry and worry that you're going to get caught.
But you don't get caught. You've stolen money, you've used it to benefit yourself, and you've gotten away Scot-free.
In the moment of that realization, your entire personal code of ethics begins to short-circuit, and you don't even notice. You go back to work.
You still cling to your morals, or at least you think you do. You've stolen money once and you're never going to do it again unless there's another emergency.
But somehow, every difficulty in your life, even a formerly trivial one, is now an emergency. Your toddler flushed your brand new iPhone? Emergency. Your cat swallowed a 2x4 LEGO brick and had to be rushed to the vet's office? Emergency. You downloaded Raid: Shadow Legends and one thing led to another? Emergency. Your favorite shitposting forum needs to order a new server and the goal is at 4200/5000 shirt sales and it looks like they're not gonna reach it in time? Big fucking emergency man, like seriously raid the charity's coffers for that one and then sew a quilt made from all the plague doctor bird stickers that you bought.
The common thread to pretty much all fraud cases is that people start out not wanting to steal anything, then they steal a little bit out of desperation, then they steal a shitload. Unsupervised access to money that's not yours
will fuck with your head, and you should never get a job that involves handling money unless there are strong internal controls that protect both your employer and yourself. To use a particularly autistic metaphor, money is like that Lifestream stuff from Final Fantasy 7. It's green, it's powerful, the world runs on it, and handling it without protection will mutate the everlasting shit out of you.
(If you exist in a post-money communist economy, replace all above mentions of "money" with "potatoes" or whatever other unit of exchange has arisen to prevent everybody from laying claim to every possible good and service that they want whenever they want it. If you exist in a post-money, post-scarcity, post-economy Star Trek wonderland where all possible goods and services are yours for absolutely free upon demand, take off your VR headset and punch yourself repeatedly in the face.)
To tie all of my sperging back to the subject person of this thread: Lou lies and defrauds for a living. He's been doing this for years, and the repeated act of stealing shit and getting away with it has fucked him up little by little, month by month, year by year, until we see before us a morbidly obese 36-year-old transtrender who jerks off to cats. And he'll only get worse.
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