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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 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.
Whether it's true I don't have the slightest idea but I don't see what the semantic mystery is.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"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