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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."
How the heck the guy didn't have any indication something was already paid I have no clue, but others in the finance department would try to catch as many duplicate checks on the way out as they could. As you might have guessed, the company is long gone.
How is it that the government spent $160-million, got nothing in return and no one noticed?"
It happens and not just in the public sector.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That amount of money should at least cover the maintenance contract to get a teenager in a suit to come and clean the filter on the power supplies of at least 3 mini's.
Oh, you said HP? Sorry, I thought you meant Data General. Coz, back a few years we used to pay a *hell* of a lot of money just to get a couple of filters cleaned.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
$160 million in software, hardware, and labour
So after the exchange rate, what's that in moose?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
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.
Who gave the Canadian Department of National Defence $160,000,000?
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Oh please. The Liberal's in Canada are considerably more left than the Republicans in the US. Of course, the Conservative Party here in Canada is also considerably more left than the Republicans in the US. This probably has something to do with less religious fundamentalism in this country.
The real difference between the Liberal's and the Conservatives in Canada is their fiscal, rather than social policies. Socially, they're very close (though, the conservatives are, unsuprisingly, slightly more socially conservative (see same-sex marriage, marijuana laws, etc)). Fiscally, they are comparable to the Dems/Reps in the US, except the Conservatives in Canada want to cut spending along with taxes, rather than just the latter.
As for the rest of it, well, that remains to be seen. There was plenty of corruption in the previous Liberal governments. Will that continue? I don't know. Would it be better with an NDP or Conservative government? I'm not so sure...
"...even large companies are not above a little fraud now and then."
Seems like lots of large companies these days seem to specialize in fraud. I won't mention Halliburton or anyone else accused of defrauding the US government.
more than $160 million in software
Why, that's over 10 years of the Canadian national defense budget. Is this possible? Looking at the 2003 budget:
Molson Ale $11.2 mil
Tuques $3.5 mil
Flags $1.8 mil
Fireworks $1.2 mil
Bullwinkle Horns $0.8 mil
Girls Gone Wild video $0.3 mil
Of course, that's in Canadian dollars. US money, it's only $34.12.
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.
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.
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.
Why the hell do they need that? It's not like anybody hates Canada. I mean, why do you think US citizens put maple leafs on their backpacks when they travel around Europe?
The US - yeah, we need a big defense department the way we go around pissing everybody off. But not Canada. They're like a harmless little mouse.
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.
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.
Pappa, what is "business ethics"???
Oh, my son, this is a very important concept. Hmmm, let's see. Suppose a customer left the store and dropped a $20 bill on the floor and did not notice. This is when business ethics comes into play: should you tell your partner or not???
Wow, it's a good thing THAT got moderated informative, as it sure was chock-full of accurate, unbiased information (especially considering that the Progressive Conservatives *no longer exist*). The new Conservative Party (merger of the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives) is a more right-wing party, that definitely has some basis of social conservatism (via the Alliance) as well as your usual fiscal conservatism and other generally right-wing-associated policy. They are probably comparable to the Republicans.
:) -- in some parts of the States, unfortunately, due to ingrained fears of anything remotely "communist"). Anyway, they aren't a "communist party", they are simply more toward the left than Americans have in a mainstream party.
;).
The Liberals are more like the Democrats, though probably a little more to the left. More progressive socially, though recently they have a streak of fiscal conservatism (which is likely the reason for the parent's comparison to the Republicans, as this has not always been their hallmark and moves them little more to the right than Canadians are used to). Traditionally a "central" party, though more "a little right-of-center with the occasional spattering of the left". Whatever that means.
As for the NDP, they are a much more left-leaning party, and there is no real comparison to an American party (IMHO they would likely be lynched -- figuratively
This is (I hope) a slightly less biased outlook on the three major Canadian parties than that presented by the parent, who I expect is a fervent NDP supporter
Gov: We want our money back for the stuff you didn't deliver.
HP: It is too late. You waited too long to ask.
Gov: But we didn't have the software and servers to track stuff, and so didn't know fast enough.
HP: Well, why didn't you get such a computer system?
Gov: Because you haven't delivered it yet.
Table-ized A.I.
Fiscally, they are comparable to the Dems/Reps in the US, except the Conservatives in Canada want to cut spending along with taxes, rather than just the latter.
Of course the leader of the Liberals well known for his massive spending cuts. Also note that the last Tory government racked up record levels of debt while the current liberal government has placed Canada as the only G8 country without a deficit. I don't think there's really an idealogical difference between the (old Tories) and the Liberals, at least fiscally.
On the first point, I don't know where the Grandparent was coming from. All major Canadian parties are way 'left' of the republicans, and in most cases the democrats too. What would happen if a Canadian party suggested ending public healthcare? What would happen if an American party seriously hinted at implementing public health-care?
The Reform-Tory merger will change things, but overall I hope that the old guard take control over the (new) Conservative party so that there's a reasonable alternative to Liberal east of Manitoba.
After 17 years in the DND, I'll bet against the DND in this battle. A Defense WAN ripped off from the Reserves (and then re-implemented incorrectly), Admin Clerks and Truckers in charge of IT resources, zero to none knowledge of networking, an Officer corps that believes sending email means that you are an 'e-business' and a R&D section that wonders why it's so difficult to implement Netbios nationally.
Top that off with a mentality that everything and everything has to run through either an outside consultant or a 10 year contact with a 'Quebec company' (which only means that they have a place in Quebec to send the cheques), and you have a recipe for disaster.
HP 1, DND 0.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
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.
If Carly Fiorina becomes Martha Stewart's cell mate, can we expect some tasteful lavendar-scented gingham-pattern HP boxes in the near future?
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
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.
--
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
Yes, it's true, we have TWO Republican parties in Canada.
Oh, come on. I'll probably be voting NDP as well in the next federal election, as I did in the last two elections I voted in, but comparing the Liberals and even the Conservatives to the Republicans is completely ridiculous.
Perhaps you just don't understand how incredibly reactionary and right-wing the Republicans are.
First off, Republicans don't support socialized medicare on the scale present in Canada, they generally don't like gay marriage, they are generally against gun control, they are generally in favour of harsh penalties for drug violations.
And they seem to like funding the military.
Though the Liberals haven't done much about gay marriage or drug law yet, they are talking about it, and on the rest of these issues they disagree with Republicans. If you want any evidence, look how often Ralph Klein is complaining about the Liberals doing stuff that threatens Alberta's oil industry; the thought of Republicans (at least the ones in office now) coming out against the oil industry is laughable.
The Conservatives don't really have much of a cohesive policy set yet, but after that flap with two-tier health care in 2000 they're sure as hell not going to go against the Canada Health Act, whatever Belinda Stronach says. I agree they're the most Republican of Canada's parties, though.
I agree that, far too often, the Liberals talk left, do little, and it's becoming more and more obvious they are disturbingly corrupt. Chretien (spell his name right, btw) did a bit as he was leaving, but it remains to be seen how much of that will really see the light of day. But they're not complete liars; most of them honestly are leftists.
I have high hopes for the NDP in the next election. Layton is a bit of a showman at times, but he really does seem to be building momentum.
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.
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.
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
Hey what do you want for $161 million?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?