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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."
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.
As someone else pointed out the corruption is not in the US government but with the companies supplying IT services to them. Practically every large company in IT seems to be involved, from Microsoft to HP, IBM and Sun. Which is annoying for those of us who love a good Microsoft bash, it seems they are not the worst offenders in this case.
As I read it the /. economic model for these scams goes something like this:
There seem to be other variations on the theme, such as giving share options instead of discounts. Either way the US government have been overcharged it seems. Hope I'm right about this as it's a complex issue and the article is a little vague on the details, that's why I thought this summary would be useful. :)
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
... 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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
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)
"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)
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm not encouraging this or claiming it should go unpunished, but I know if I'd been in a management position along the line I don't know how/why I could/should be stopping such things (defensibly).
The fact that a fish swims in water does not make it an expert in fluid dynamics. GogglesPisano (199483)