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Oracle To Pay US Almost $200M To Resolve False Claims Lawsuit
coondoggie writes "In what it says is the largest False Claims Act settlement it has ever collected, the US General Services Administration will get $199.5 million plus interest from Oracle for 'failing to meet their contractual obligations.' According to the US Department of Justice, 'the settlement resolves allegations that, in contract negotiations and over the course of the contract's administration, Oracle knowingly failed to meet its contractual obligations to provide GSA with current, accurate and complete information about its commercial sales practices, including discounts offered to other customers, and that Oracle knowingly made false statements to GSA about its sales practices and discounts.'"
Sadly, this business practice indicates a financial incentive for oracle to lie to high profile clients in order to charge them extra.
If only other high profile clients would take heed of this and avoid oracle like plague, rather than thinking the practice will stop as a result of this settlement.
Business practices exist as the basis by which that company operates. Being shown to be a defrauder like this, shows that oracle relies on such practices, and are not likely to change.
(Quite frankly, given the sociopathic nature of oracle's ceo, I am not surprised by this development.)
"The DoJ also noted that the settlement resolves a lawsuit filed on behalf of the US government by former Oracle employee, Paul Frascella, who will receive $40 million as his share of the recovery in the case. Under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, private citizens can bring lawsuits on behalf of the United States and share in any recovery obtained by the government."
At a previous employer, we were a moderately sized company with a significant Oracle DB back-end behind an online platform. While the relationship had been rather professional in the beginning, Oracle's sales tactics over the years have really taken a turn to the point of being beyond what I ever saw from Microsoft in the 90's. As an existing DB customer, we were looking for an SSO solution to the platform. Oracle has such a bundle, and in exchange for buying the solution, our VP negotiated for them to provide several weeks of consulting services to help implement. Months later, it was a disaster (its a hodgepodge of companies they have purchased over the years and nothing overly coherent) and so the org decided to completely abort and go in another direction. We agreed to part ways and let them keep the up front cost and first year of support, but come the end of our support year, asked to remove the recurring support option on our contract for this software we no longer used. The two sales folks in charge of our contract were afraid of looking like they lost an option, and decided to strong-arm and said that if we pushed to have this line item removed, they would increase the support costs of all the remaining items we continued to use beyond what we would pay if we just kept the line item. We were now forced to continue to pay for a completely separate SKU/product we were not using if we wished to maintain consistent terms on the Oracle DB we could not easily displace.
And if you want to see the shit they have been pulling with CPU's going multi-core and beyond over the past several years, look up the crap they pulled with HP when they tried to provide a BIOS option to lock a multicore CPU down to a single one to allow the server to remain Oracle compliant. Their explicit BIOS notes said as much at one point. Hint: F_ck Oracle again. You have no choice in this model of growing core density but to continue to pay more to Oracle, even if you hard-limit the cores down.
The government is the buyer, and they are making this disclosure a contractual requirement. If Oracle doesn't want to disclose their discounts, they don't have to sell to the government.
If you are a buyer, you can also demand that Oracle disclose their discounts to other customers. If oracle doesn't want to disclose their discounts, they don't have to sell to you.
But if they DO sign a contract with you, and they CLAIM that they gave you full disclosure, and they LIED to you, then you can SUE them. This is what the government is doing. There's no special law to implement, and there's no special treatment for the government.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
"Why do we allow this information to remain proprietary? Conservatives and free market folks should be up in arms, since efficient markets require information."
In practice, it's because most 'mainstream' people in the USA with any clout who describe themselves as conservatives & free markets (e.g. editorial line of the Wall Street Journal) are not actually true free marketers, instead they are class advocates for the wealthy and powerful.
Policies which get in the way of high profit margins for powerful corporations and people are disfavored, such as anti-trust regulations, or indeed any action to ensure true price-transparency and remove barriers to competitive substitution.
For instance, the Wall Street Journal editors strenuously argue against rigorous randomized controlled studies funded by Medicare which evaluate head-to-head effectiveness, risks, and cost of pharmaceuticals. Because such information in practice might result in lower pharmaceutical profitability and lower government spending.
This is how the _Economist_ differs from the _Wall Street Journal_: the first is an advocate for capitalism, the second is an advocate for wealth.