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NEC Admits To Ripping Off Schools Through E-Rate Program
MAurelius writes "The New York Times (regist. req'd) is reporting that NEC now admits to ripping off multiple low-income school districts by connecting them to the internet with equipment more advanced and expensive than necessary. Several orders of magnitude more expensive. All paid for by telephone rate-payers. That would be you."
Here's a registration free link thanks to Google.
Maybe this snuck through because it was done in a separate program funded a different way, but it still amazes me that they thought they wouldn't get caught.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Justice has been served.
NEC then sent a bill to the E-Rate administrators, a quasi-governmental agency for tens of millions of dollars more than the actual cost of the equipment.
....
If someone robs a bank overnight (no people harmed) and takes 10 million dollars the shit would hit the fan.
But a corporation?
and to pay $20.7 million in fines and restitution.
Oh, I suppose theres no harm trying is there - if they get caught, they only pay double what they could have scammed.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Multimillions for a school lan? The school that I was at up until 2 years ago seemed like i could have bought all the IT equipment for a couple of hundred dollars. If that.
It must have been all the computers running Win98 and the IT guy wishing he hadn't moved to Win2000 on his main computer. And servers that don't run Linux!!! NT Server 4? Since I left, apparently they ended up having to install software on every second computer, with the costs and all.
That's M$ for you. Not that this is the case this time, except for the servers. The CAL idea though, the servers would have been expensive though...
Cough...oversight...cough
Wake up!
As a European I believe you'd better hve such a program run by independant beaurocrats than For Profit commercial interests.
And than elect thrustworthy officials to contral the beaurocrats.
But with so few going to the polls, who can complain about the politicians?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Anyone can get ripped off at any level. The good thing is that someone at least *noticed* this one and is now beating restitution out of the victims. [Emphasis added]
Typo?
What worries me is that it's probably right as writ.
What exactly is wrong with gaining karma from doing something that benefits the readers of slashdot? I'm thankful the grandparent found that link, and I'm thankful it was +5 so I could see it no matter what.
espo
I think they claimed they "needed" the equipment.
It's as if you buy a computer at a store and they tell you that you have to add a 900$ sound card [which is just a cheap 10$ CMPCI clone] to make the computer work then pocket the difference.
How is that not fraud? You were told you needed the sound card [not true] and that the sale price was 900$ [also not true]. Similarly they were told they needed equipment that wasn't required.
I mean what is the alternative? If you can't rely on the word of the service provider than you might as well learn to be a medic, car mechanic, building architect, etc, etc, etc.
Granted I agree the average school I.T. guy is just some jackass college dropout [was my experience when in high school] who should have known better. I'd be happier if they burned some IT guys and NEC sales people simultaneously.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
What do I do??
That would depend on which variety of non-english you are.
NEC then sent a bill to the E-Rate administrators, a quasi-governmental agency for tens of millions of dollars more than the actual cost of the equipment.
If they over charged tens of millions of dollars and are only paying back 20 million this seems like NEC still made money on the deal.
What every happened to triple damages?
So far as NEC is concerned crime still pays!
My school in North London had a server room full of expensive optical hardware, several firewalls and servers, bought at a cost to students of around a million pounds. I once managed to get my hands on a bandwidth usage chart, and found that a Linksys router, around 100 at the time, and three 20-port switches, each around 100 could easily cope with the usage patterns.
It's telling that the IT administrators who installed the million pound system where an equivalent solution under 500 could have worked just fine, all left that year. The school is left with a completely irrelevant infrastructure that costs thousands of pounds a year to maintain and support.
All of this happens because, when a school installs a system, it's not their money that's being spent, but that of the students (or sometimes the taxpayer). Big hardware firms love to wine and dine school purchasing directors in a bid to convince them that they really need this fancy kit. It's in all of their interests to squander the money, and nothing is happening to change that.
I work for a private non-profit school (as a tech-coordinator and network admin). Most of our kids are public district funded, so we are eligible for e-rate funded programs.
We have none, here's why:
E-rate, like most government programs, is waist high in beaurocratic paperwork and red-tape. No one in the system looks for competing bids for two reasons:
1. There is no financial incentive for schools to pick a low bidder - the money is free as far as they're concerned.
2. It adds an enormous amount of paperwork to an already overburdened school staff. Is it worth hiring a full-time position to take care of this for e-rate programs that you aren't guaranteed to receive?
Like any government system, it takes money from those who have it and tries to redistribute it to those that don't. It sounds nice - make the "haves" buy technology for the "havenots", but in reality only the "haves" have enough resources to pull it off.
We get our technology the "old-fashioned" way. We either pay for it out of school tuition, or we seek private grants.
-ted
As a European I believe you'd better hve such a program run by independant beaurocrats than For Profit commercial interests.
As an American I think we'd have a better program if the school system wasn't controlled by the government.
Do you think a for-profit private school would have wasted their budget money like this?
But Unpossible, how will poor kids go to private schools? Through scholarship programs, through charity, through hard work. Those that have good parents and want to be educated will be educated.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Then I realized it was just poor people who were getting ripped off. Whew! I mean, if NEC doesn't do it, some payday loan place or another scam artist will anyway.
http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/014084.html t io n=article&articleID=2893
http://www.parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseac
What NEC did is bad, but don't forget a lot of school boards are just as responsible if not more so. They don't have accountability until after they do something wrong. The problem in Atlanta is really horrid as the per pupil expenditure for education in Atlanta is one of the highest yet produces some of the worst results (we are in the 12k per student range)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
As Isaac Asimov put it (wording approximate):
0 spsystems.net
"If I must be ruledby larcenous bullies, I much prefer that they be located far away. Local bullies know far more about me and my doings than faraway bullies sitting in offices in Washington, and can oppress me far more effectively."
Source Henry Spencer: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Htt7u5.E6n%4
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
This gets back to my rant on providing more money for education. There IS NO LACK OF FUNDS for Education in the United States, there is a TOTAL lack of of responsibility for those funds. I vote down (and will continue to do so) every school levey and politian that would increase school taxes. I think public schools are one of the most important institution we have in this country though. The issue is I have been to school recently as a 20 something I can tell you that most of their budget is waste. Why in heavens name do we need video on demand huge writing labs of computers fast one with P4s for word processing? Not to mention new uniforms for the band every year or half of the other eqipment they buy and never use. The huge mulitmedia room my HS built that I saw when I went back to visit cost close to a million dollars and according to my younger sister has been used all of about once in two years. Its all over kill, schools are run by a bunch of know nothing administrators that think technology is going to solve all their education problems. Instead of spending money on hightech schools should spend money on text books, teachers, and the building(a confortable enviorment is importand for learning). This is not to say they should not have a well outfited computer lab to teach things like computer science . I won't support any money for schools untill I see it being spent on what matters though, teachers and books. In MN Ventera cut the budget drasticly at first school admins tried all sorts of scare tactics like claiming they could only afford to run schools four days a week and would have to cut every after school program and riddiculous claims like that. What really happend though is Jessy pushed the budget through and schools had to start to be responsible with the money, I don't see as much flasy new toys but overall the schools have not suffered. They simply buy books and teachers and maintain the buildings. It works good. Now idealy we could not cut school budgets and pay teachers more, that might result in better teachers, and again as a recent grad I learned more from teachers then and multimedia presentation tought me. A good lecurer with a chalk and a blackboard is far more valuable then some hack with power point.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
"That employee, Desmond McQuoid, was the custodial supervisor of the district. He pleaded guilty to mail fraud last year and was sentenced to 21 months in prison, according to Mr. Havian, the lawyer for the school district. Mr. Havian said the suit against Video Network Communications was still pending."
Pretty brutal, eh? NEC gets away with a fine, while the person that they duped and intentionally threw money at gets sent to prison. And that, my friends, is what's wrong with our justice system. Not that he shouldn't have gone to jail, but I'd like to see some NEC people get sent up the river for this too... after all, the other guy was just duped by money. NEC and this other company they speak of actually planned the fraud and intentionally sought to take taxpayer money by the millions.
I mean, I could see a scenario here where the fellow might not have even realized the scope of what was about to happen. They bribed him so that no other competitive bids would come in: a person who was easily duped might have just assumed that they wanted the business, not that they were planning on bending the school district over if you know what I mean.
-Vendal Thornheart