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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."
I know unrestrained cynicism is the "in-thing" among nerds these days, but this statement is silly:
"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."
They can't both be at fault here! I mean, its not physically possible. The Canadian government could not have lost products if HP never gave them any!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I would lay my money on this being a govt screwup rather than HP fooling them.Theres no way a big corp like HP would fool a prospective HUGE customer like the canadian govt and charge them for something that they didnt deliver.(and get caught!) :-)
The world around govt's have know to screw things up due to the sheer laziness and absence of co-ordination between govt departments.Looks like one desk jockey for got to enter a few bills into the accounting system
Lord of the Binges.
If HP did receive the payment, but failed to deliver the goods, then isn't it clear who's to blame?
Imagine if your client mistakenly paid your company $2,000 extra, do you
(1) keep quiet?
(2) ask what that $2K is for?
One of my clients has a habit of overpaying the bill, because it is always late in paying, thus when the next invoice (with 2 months balance) arrives, they then paid the 1st invoice, and the 2nd invoice. I have to tell them that, and hold the credit for the following month(s).
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
and even large companies are not above a little fraud now and then
Wow, that's alarming.
I thought only the tiny puny mom-n-pop companies like Global Crossing and Enron had fraud problems.
Of course it had something to do with it. But this investigation will deal with the Canadian subsidiary, thus puts this battle squarely in Canadian territory where the FTC has absolutely no power.
"even large companies are not above a little fraud now and then"
Large companies are above nothing, but they don't commit fraud - the people who work there do. The bigger the company, the less accountable anyone usually is, especially in the billing bureaucracy (ironically staffed by "accountants"). And the bigger the company, the more valuable the "mistakes" which can be pulled off, and accumulated. When I worked for Northern Telecom in Toronto, they failed to pay my tiny consulting company over C$50K, out of C$300K, that they owed us for over 6 months (after the latest allowed pay date). They wasted $Ks of our management's otherwise billable time in the 1990s bubble, making us chase their accounts-payable people around all of North America. And since their bureaucracy was so distributed, no one cared if we stopped working on our deadline until they paid us, so we would just have lost the gig and any leverage on getting paid. To see how consistent this is, consider that from the first week on the project there were career NorTel managers, helpfully reminding me that NorTel commonly pulled that kind of crap, and kept the $Ms in interest on late payments, as part of their profitability. And that was the pattern of most of the larger corporations we had as clients. Smaller companies' billing problems could be dealt with directly, with decisions made by a single person, so turnaround could be swift. Imagine how long it took the Federal Canadian and Ontario Provincial governments to pay us the $10Ks they owed us: years.
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make install -not war
Left, Right, what a lot of Bunk! Communists and Fascists, not much difference in the end. Canadians float around in the middle. Ultimately not as socialist as many nations in the industrialized world, and more so than the USA. We're under considerable pressure to align our policies with the Republican agenda, however, and there's a groundswell of resistance around sovereignty issues.
The Liberals aim to appear just that, generally liberal. They purport to support a social safety net, and a large federal government that ensures equality in many areas, including in distribution of services between the civil powers, i.e. the provinces. Note I said "purport," because while they make these noises and a mixture of real gestures and superficialities in that direction, they're also busy working on moving power and resources over to the corporate sector under the guise of trade liberalization.
The various conservative voices, now mostly under the banner of the new-ish Conservative Party, are social individualists and fiscal corporatists (not as ravenously domineering or overtly theocratic as the Republicans, but close). The powers in the party actually want to be more like the Republicans, but strategically can't pull it off (most of us wouldn't stand for it).
The New Democratic Party is out-and-out socialist in platform, and many of its members are easily identified as such, but as a whole they don't always vote in that direction, and don't instil much confidence in most voters at the federal level. However, they have occasionally been brilliant in opposition (a voice for accountability) and often do well on the provincial level, forming many provincial governments over the years.
And the Bloc Quebecois? Well, you'd have to ask a Quebecker to really get a grasp of what they're about, it seems to be a mix of all of the above with a large dash of Quebec semi-nationalism, it's a powerful strategic alliance really.
Anyway, you can vote early and vote often, but the government still gets in. Much of the power really lies one level down from the Cabinet Ministries, in the top-level bureaucrats, many of whom are graft appointees. We have marginally more choice than the republic to the south, but it's still a first-past-the-post system, and so is questionably democratic, as people wind up voting strategically (or lazily) instead of for the representatives they really want.
Damn those pesky terrorists
They are appointed by elected officials. They just hold their position for a very long time. Cabinet ministers are appointed, for example. So the idea is that you consider the senators that they will appoint as a corollary of actually voting for your party.
The real purpose is this: senators have to be placed in the first place, but after that they are accountable to noone. And they don't have to be cagey and electable, they just have to have the respect of your elected representative enough to appoint them.
IMHO, their terms should have a long set length (not just till they retire) - say, 20 years - and they should not be reappointable. This would prevent any anachronistic Thurmond-types kicking around.
Either way they are placed democratically - they are appointed by an elected person. The real advantage is that after their appointment, they have no ties to anyone who could manipulate them - not their party, not their home riding, not their campaign contributors.
But yes, they also have no responsibility to the populace. That's the catch.
Now, as a Canadian taxpayer, I have to decide whether I'm being hornswaggled by the Canadian government or the Hewlett-Packard corporation. That is a tough call. I am feeling mighty tender after the numerous scandals which have come to light recently, so I guess it doesn't make much difference. When I read last summer that the CEO of H-P (Ms. Fiorentino?) was paid in excess of $100 million my thought was that you don't make that much money for doing anything honest. That's a lot of money to misplace though, and I'm guessing a lot more to find it.
Yeah it's surprising how many American's are ignorant of the above fact.
Does anyone out there know how much it costs to extract a standard barrel of oil from the tar sands?
Sure it's more expensive than just scooping up the stuff from saudi arabia, but a lot of money is being invested around here...
I got invoiced for Magazines I never order and of course never receaved.
I tossed it in the trash.
Later a dept collection agentcy shows up.
Now I'm having to go to cort to dispute the bill.
Multi billing is fraud but it's up to the guy signing the checks to catch it.
I don't actually exist.
Canada can still easily investigate why HP charges $40 for a printer with a cartridge, yet $50 for a new cartridge. I'm sure they can find that to be against the law somehow... maybe an environmental one.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
In order to understand statements about both the Liberals and the Conservatives being like the Republicans, you must look at politics not as a single dimension (left-right), but in two dimensions. There is the economic (left--right or popular--corporate), and the social ( libertarian--authoritarian ).
For a better explaination of this, see The Political Compass.
As I see it, the Republicans and the Conservatives are Authoritarian (except for gun control), and economically right-wing (in everything but paying lip-service to the Canada Health Act, in the case of the Conservatives). I base this on the actions of the Reagan, Bush Sr, Mulroney, and Bush Jr administrations, and the public comments of Preston Manning, Stockwell Day, Peter McKay, and the current leadership candidates.
The Liberals are socially slightly authoritarian (remember, Gay Marraige and Marijuanna decriminalization were decisions by the supreme court, not the Liberal party, and the crackdowns outside the APEC (Vancouver, 1997) and FTAA (Quebec, 2001) conferences).
Economically under Chretien the Liberals tend to govern right wing, while running for office by making left-leaning promises. In 1993 these were scraping the GST and the FTA. Since they were elected Paul Martin (finance minister through most of Chretien's administration) has kept the GST, while allowing some corporations to defer billions of dollars in taxes.
Meanwhile Pierre Pettigrew has been negotiating the extremely corporateist NAFTA, FTAA and MAI agreements.
The Liberals also pay lip-service to the Canada Health Act while strangling funding to health care in poorer provinces.
Since Paul Martin came to the leadership moderates in the Liberal caucus like Sheila Copps are being forced out. This is very similar to the transformation of the BC Liberal party into a reactionary corporatist elite after it was flooded by disenfranchised Socreds, who elected Gordon Campbel their leader despite him being so right-wing he's even making Socreds uneasy. I actually had a conversation about this issue with Gordon Wilson when he was leader of the now defunct PDA. I suggested he join the NDP; about a week later he did. I doubt it was from my urging, I'm just some schmo who ran into him in the halls of the leg. when I was sightseeing in Victoria.
Under Bill Clinton, the Democrats tended to govern libertarian and economically centrist, except for negotiating the corporatist FTA, and NAFTA.
The NDP's official policies tend to be libertarian and left leaning. Party members are mostly libertarian and range on the left-right scale from centrist to quite left. In power in BC (I'm talking about this because of someone who implied the NDP is hated in BC), the NDP had 4 successive administrations (in 3 terms).
You are the first openly fascist person I have met.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places