DOJ Names Dozens of IT Vendors in Kickback Scheme

grantus writes "Today, the U.S. Department of Justice joined three whistleblower lawsuits against Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Accenture alleging a massive kickback scheme on government contracts. Among the IT vendors listed in the lawsuit as Accenture partners are Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Dell and Oracle."

Comments

Re:A show of hands if you are surprised

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... scamming millions if not billions from the US government who thought that it was getting a good deal off of each company fighting for the deal when really it was getting scammed by a pseudo-monopoly.

Term is "oligopoly". Means a collusion of a number of companies to act like a single monopolist.

Re:same crooks, new name

[Expertus]

While Accenture was formed by Arthur Anderson as a consulting division in 1953, they split from the company (1989) before the ugliness with Enron, and finally severed all contractual ties in 2000. Arthur Anderson had a separate consulting branch that directly competed with Accenture after the split. So, yes, they used to be a part of AA, but as far as I know, they had nothing to do with the questionable accounting practices that led to AA's downfall. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture)

Re:A show of hands if you are surprised

[psxman]

"Cartel" seems more appropriate. (an oligopoly, off the top of my head, just means that there's very few competitors, not necessarily that they're working together)

Re:same crooks, new name

[afidel]

Actually they were the IT consulting wing of AA that fought tooth and nail to separate themselves from AA because of the bad practices going on over at AA. They even took a several hundred million dollar loss in the spinoff because the accounting side hide losses from another division in their side of the ledger, there was a lawsuit but Accenture dropped it because they were just sick of dealing and being associated with the accounting firm. They aren't choir boys but they really did have more ethics than AA. I never worked for them but did have them as a client and got to meet quite a few of the guys at a couple of their offices.