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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."
The corruption in question isn't in the government, it's in the vendors that sell products and services to the government.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If you had RTFA, you would have seen that the corruption wasn't with the govt. but with other companies. The other companies received money from Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Dell and Oracle, among others for preferential treatment when it came to govt contracts.
RTFA, the US government was the ones that where getting scammed.
Effectively with government contracts all the companies would agree to estimate far higher then it would ever take to fill the order. Step two, the contract winner would take the amount of money for the contract, subtract how much it really would have taken(this being raw "bonus" profit) and split that amongst the group since it involved the entire group to go along with it for it to work. Wait for the next contract and do it all over again, 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.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
I guess you see only what you want to see.
...blah, blah, blah, OUTSIDE!, blah, blah...
Reminds me of that Far Side cartoon "What a dog hears"
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I see your point, but if you look at the two parties involved, buisness and goverment. Buisness (capitalism) is doing what "it is", makeing sure it obtains a surplus of funds and market, where as the goverment (democracy) fails to be ruled by the people and follow a few select people.
A democracy that is allowed direct contact with special interest groups and lobbyism will drift towards an oligarchy, unless both (goverment and buisness) have a strong morale and/or rules (law) that are upheld. An oligarchy can, of course, only happend if the people let it, but I will let that be up to you (plural) to judge if that will happen.
Note to self: Don't try to write political posts at 5AM when you haven't been to bed yet. XD
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Yeah, yeah. And some say "new Senate majority leader makes shady real estate deals in Las Vegas and hides the income" or "the Democrat congressman from Louisiana with $90,000 of bribes found in his freezer was just put by Pelosi on the committee overseeing Homeland Security affairs" too. Are you really prepared to assert that none of the thousands of career agency and departmental procurement people that have their hands in the administration of federal IT contracts weren't hired during the previous administration, or don't consider themselves to be Democrats? Wake me up when the party you clearly prefer doesn't, while wagging its finger at the other party and promising to cut down on pet project funding once they got control of congress, graft almost $4 billions in pork onto a defense appropriations bill (peanut storage? giving tax dollars to spinach growers that weren't insured against e coli losses?) to buy supporting votes from their otherwise skittish fellow party members. Nah, never mind. Cuz, that would require some honesty about your double standards. Want to bitch about politicians? Fine. Me too. Just don't pretend that your preferred political camp isn't also a fabulous source of shallow, grasping, corrupt twits and the inevitable resulting satire.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Usually, governments don't order a dishwasher or a fridge. They order power plants and recycling centers. And there are only so many companies who can offer those.
Also, as the government you can't only take price and quality into consideration. There is a reason why the feds drive around in US built cars and not in BMWs. Simply 'cause one of their goals is to increase the own infrastructure and business power and rely as far as possible on goods built in the country.
Military hardware is even more complicated, since you have to trust the companies far further than with some ordinary civilian stuff.
So your choices become very, very narrow. You usually only have a handful of companies to pick from, if that. So it's easy for them to form a cartel, if only a "secret" one, by fixing prices and splitting the revenue. And that, in turn, is illegal.
So you can't simply assume there is someone "outside" the cartel. The company would have to be in your country, it would have to be large enough to be able to offer the service requested. And if it isn't part of the cartel, they would quickly find a way to acquire and split that competitor.
Business is a shark's world. Don't think they would accept a competitor without fighting him with claws and teeth.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
you don't get it at all do you? let me break it down some more. company A and company B secretly agree to quote a lot more then what they would normally quote, and which ever one of them wins the contract sub contracts the REAL price out to the other, with the winner skimming the fat off the top of the "arranged" price and the loser getting the work(which would still be a very healthy profit). everyone wins - except the tax payer which gets screwed with artifical prices.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....