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Did HP Defraud the Canadian Government?
lightsaber1 writes "In this age of financial scandal in the Canadian Government it's hardly surprising to see that Hewlett-Packard is now being accused of charging the Canadian Department of National Defence for more than $160 million in software, hardware, and labour that was not delivered. The DND is confident it will get the money back, but HP is denying all responsibility, pinning the blame on an error within the DND itself. In all of this it is clear that the Government can lose track of a lot of money easily and even large companies are not above a little fraud now and then."
This is likely part of the recent Liberal scandal, and therefore it's evident that there is a significant level of corruption in the Liberal party of Canada. For all those of you who are Americans, you should know that the Liberal party is the same as the Republicans, the Progressive Conservative party is also the same as the Republicans, while the New Democratic Party is quite left of the Democrats in the US. Yes, it's true, we have TWO Republican parties in Canada.
My thoughts are that this is definately part of the Liberal scandal, and not to restate this, but it's very important someone cleans up Canadian politics, and IMHO, that is the NDP. The thing is, the NDP would need to remain in power for two or three terms in order to do that, and it may take even longer to clean up the huge mess left from years of PC and Liberal waste/corruption. People would go to jail, people would pay for their crimes. People like Jean Cretien, former prime minister of Canada, who oversaw the entire scandal, and was likely heavily involved. People like the current PM, Paul Martin. Leaders should go to jail if they rob the taxpayers as much as these people have!
There are some differences in the Canadian governmental system than American, and buying off our representatives is a bit harder. Not impossible, mind you.
Our Senate is appointed, not elected, so campaign funding on that front isn't really viable. Although out-and-out bribery could still be a possibility.
The Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons, not a separately elected individual, and therefore controls how the party votes.
The ethics minister (theoretically) is a watchdog to prevent abuses of power or introducing bills based on the needs of special interest.
Add into this that each MP has limited power, based on the fact that their ridings are relatively small compared to US electoral areas (population-wise, I'm sure many of the geographical areas are quite large), and it would take a very concentrated effort to garner enough support through bribery and financing to make a dent.
Of course, this is all from the deep recesses of my high school social science memories, so I could be a bit off.
Canada has MANY parties. The four biggest are the Liberals, Conservatives, Bloq Quebecois, and the NDP. There are many smaller parties as well and many independents run for seats in the house of commons (like the US congress). The Conservatives are the equivalent to US Republicans. The Liberals (although getting more right wing) are the equivalent to the Democrats. The NDP is quite a bit left, but still in the Democratic vein.
Overall though, all the parties in Canada, including the Conservatives are more left wing than anything in the US. We have national medicare, publicly funded universities etc. that even the Conservatives fundamentally believe in. Recently, it's true that the Liberals were involved in a scandal involving many millions of dollars of "favours" to private companies, but even these were more along the lines of fast-track bidding and not all out policy-bribery like is common in the US.
To get back to the original point of the article, with the department of Defence getting shafted by HP, this is likely due to the general incompetence of a few technology people and their managers, not a particular party.
The government is made up of people who couldn't get jobs in the private sector. They also have job security for life. This encourages the worst in government employees, attracting the laziest and least skilled among the working populace.
that's a stunningly ignorant remark...
however stupid the actions of governments may seem, it takes an awful lot of effort to get elected (system of checks and balances...?), particularly to the higher echelons of government.
i don't know about canada, but here in ireland, most of the members of our government are barristers or financiers or any one of hundreds of highly trained professions. yes, there are one or two wildcards, but that's the nature of a democracy!
Insightful? Flamebait...
and if you see me strut, remind me of what left this outlaw torn...
I know thats a joke but it raises a good point.
:).
$160 Million US is 210 Million CA.
$160 Million CA is 121 Million US.
Though, if you've lost over 100 Million, whats another 40 Million between friends. I accept donations
Right. And there is no way a big company like Oracle would fool a prospective HUGE customer like the California government and charge them for something they couldn't use like 270,000 licenses for their 230,000 employees, only a quarter of which actually needed to access a database... and yet they did! Now, HP has a slightly better reputation to uphold than Oracle, but still, I wouldn't put it past them. (By the way, doesn't CA (California) have a larger government budget than CA (Canada)?)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
...is that $160 Canadian or real money? That is $159 million Canadian or $120 million US
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Here's the The CBC article about this story, and here's the
Radio-Canada story (in French, of course).
By the way, I'm quite impressed with Radio-Canada's record at scooping its English equivalent. This story was available on src.ca a good few hours before it was on CBC. A good excuse to practise my French.
"It is very clear that it is going to take all of the actions to recover the monies," Prime Minister Paul Martin told reporters after a cabinet meeting. "I've met with [Defence Minister] Mr. Pratt. He's been in contact with the authorities and we will be doing everything we can."
That's the only quotation in the article attributed to PM Paul Martin. Unless I'm really missing something, it's fairly benign and not the least bit libelous.
I have two bits of advice for you, Mr. Gary:
1. Read the fucking article.
2. Realize that not every decision or assertion made in Canada is made by our PM. I'm assuming that you do realize that Canada is quite a large country - our parliament contains 301 seats that are filled by asses of people who are *constantly* searching for a way to get into the news.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
There should be a poll, which big software/tech/IT company has the largest reputation for being unethical.
While I'm pretty sure I know who would finish first given sentiments around here, I'm curious about the others rankings.
DND (Department of National Defence) had a problem a few years back with their accounting system, and ended up paying late charges on almost all invoices because they couldn't process them in time. They have since claimed to have fixed this problem It may be that the guys in DND fixed that problem by not doing enough checking of the accounts before paying the invoice.
Want to know how bad the account is over at DND. The other defence scandle this week involved some solders on training who had their daily food allowances reduced retroactivly by 2/3. Several of them had to take out loans to repay the money.
OK, maybe not. But we have the largest coastline in the world, and we have alliances with other nations that lead to obligations overseas.
Then there's the national role in "Aid to the Civil Power" -- which means that if there's unrest in a region, like the Oka crisis or the October crisis, they want to be able to roll in and maintain that appearance of canadian civility. Actually there's a lot more tension in this big happy nation than outsiders realize, especially since the conquest of the First Nations isn't complete. In other words, the military unfortunately seems to be primarily there to keep us in line.
That said, chances are that the bored military administrators screwed up and HP took huge advantage of it.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Nope, I'd suggest you practice your English :-)
:), I'm a Canadian.
Well, as might have been evident from my post
Along with a monarch and a parliamentary system, we inherited mostly British spellings, which includes 'practise' as the verb and 'practice' as the noun.
Similarly, I can license my code under the GNU General Public Licence.
Canadian Federal Government budget 2003: ~$144.58 Billion US
I looked at the California budget summaries for the last couple of decades and was shocked. WTF has been going on in California that the state budget has increased 65% between 1997-98 and 2003-04?
Also, when you consider that the Canadian federal government budget is paying for a hell of a lot more services (including health care - the bulk of medicare funding still comes from the federal government), California voters have a right to feel ripped off.
http://www.freedominion.ca/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t= 20548
Like the largest oil reserve in the world perhaps? Of course it is all stuck in some bloody tar sands in northern Alberta, making it a bitch to get at.
Check out the CBC story about this scandal. HP claims that the Canadian government is actually a victim of fraud from someone in the DND. Given the other scandals in this government, I wouldn't be all that shocked.
Unamed city in CA, having a unamed noise program that spends over 20 million a year. pays consultant (large nation wide acoustic company) to prepare plans. When the city realizes the plans are riddled with errors and confronts the consultant, the consultant request additional funds because QC. was not a part of their contract. Not only that the contract that the consultant has with the city is time & materials. the consultant by the way is currently requesting more funds to complete the project that they ( a year ago) signed a contract for saying they woudl complete. Yes this is all true and my grammer sucks. But This is happening right now in a Southern CA city near you. moral of the story, get involved with your local municipality and find where your tax dollars are going. Administration doesnt' give a damn if the tax payers dont give a damn
You had better be damn careful who you accuse of fraud. Based on CBC's news coverage this evening, both sides agree that an employee of HP along with up to 6 sub contractors billed for work that was never done. HP denies that it had any official knowledge of what was happening. The goverment apparently believes them. The RCMP has been called in for a criminal investigation (seemingly targetted at the individuals involved). I don't think either side disputes what happened. It's just that the government claims that as a matter of civil law, HP is on the hook for the cash. HP, of course disagrees. I'm sure we'll see this in court. However, I don't think anyone claims that HP, as an enitity, did *anything* illegal. One of it's employees did.
I don't think you can go around saying that HP are a bunch of crooks. Especially when the evidence seems to point to the contrary. This is a pretty public forum. IANAL, but my understanding is that you could be liabel for damages done to the company's reputation...