Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
For all those of you who are Americans, you should know that the Liberal party is the same as the Republicans
This is Wrong! Former PM Chretien and current PM Martin, both Liberal, were for a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana and i believe Chretien wanted to legalize gay marriage throughout all of canada. These are just some examples, but they are definitely as left wing as, if not more than, the USA Democratic Party.
This is going off-topic but i believe you needed to be corrected on this matter.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.