Oregon Sues Oracle For "Abysmal" Healthcare Website

SpzToid (869795) writes The state of Oregon sued Oracle America Inc. and six of its top executives Friday, accusing the software giant of fraud for failing to deliver a working website for the Affordable Care Act program. The 126-page lawsuit claims Oracle has committed fraud, lies, and "a pattern of activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars". "Not only were Oracle's claims lies, Oracle's work was abysmal", the lawsuit said. Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said. "Today's lawsuit clearly explains how egregiously Oracle has disserved Oregonians and our state agencies", said Oregon Atty. Gen. Ellen Rosenblum in a written statement. "Over the course of our investigation, it became abundantly clear that Oracle repeatedly lied and defrauded the state. Through this legal action, we intend to make our state whole and make sure taxpayers aren't left holding the bag."

Oregon's suit alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, falsely convinced officials to buy "hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised." It is seeking $200 million in damages. Oracle issued a statement saying the suit "is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project. The complaint is a fictional account of the Oregon Healthcare Project."

Comments

Reputation

[Livius]

I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.

Re:Reputation

[alx512]

My employer unfortunately uses Oracle's HR management systems also. Worst piece of enterprise software I've ever seen. I have physical pain any time I have to use it. Their big iron databases used to be the shit, but even those seem to be going the way of the dodo as much cheaper, easier to use options are available these days.

Re:Reputation

[Nemyst]

It sounds like Oracle's fucking business model. Overcommit, underbudget, get the job by being the "cheapest". Once the client's committed to your implementation, claim that the project brief was misleading or something and massively jack up the budget or leave the client with a stinking piece of shit.

My university's management, financial and student software was upgraded by Oracle. Something like 70 million dollars later, the web frontend is a complete farce full of atrocious design decisions, confusing options and ridiculous limitations. The employee backend is so complicated and useless that you need a fucking MANUAL to use it, and most people need assistance to do basic tasks such as budgeting their funds.

Re:Reputation

[NoKaOi]

I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.

This is pretty much SOP with any big custom system from a big company. Sure, they'll check off the boxes of the requirements, but it'll never work right until you fork over triple what the original contract was for, for "additional implementation." It's essentially extortion because at that point the organization is so many millions of dollars into it that they're willing to spend millions more to make it functional.

I'm very pleased that Oregon is not succumbing to this extortion and are fighting back. Oracle has claimed in the press that it was because the state added additional requirements midstream, but the problem isn't that they didn't implement those additional requirements, it's that they never delivered a functioning product, thus they did not fulfill a single requirement. Even if "it works" wasn't a specific requirement, it should be implied by the existence of any requirement which in itself requires the system to be functional. I hope Oregon gets back every penny they gave to Oracle, and I hope there's a legal reason they can get some massive penalties too.

Re:Reputation

[Livius]

No, they go one better - be the most *expensive* bid, thereby convincing clueless MBAs of the superiority of your product, and then proceed to overcharge, delay, etc.

Car analogy: They sell you the most expensive car ever. Then tell you the engine costs extra. And then tell you the petrol tank is extra. And by the way don't put regular petrol in it, only aviation fuel. And isn't that logarithmic-scale odometer so much more science-y than those other brands of cars?

Re:Reputation

[Charliemopps]

I don't know if Oregon's suit has merit or not, but that sure sounds like my employer's experience with Oracle.

Mine as well. We have contracts with hundreds of IT companies, and Oracle is by far the worst I've ever dealt with.
A list of things I've witnessed oracle do first hand that make me hate them:
1. Relegate "Bugs" to a "Bug list" that is so long you actually have an account you use to log into it and see the endless list of things wrong with their software they haven't gotten around to fixing yet.
2. Support that's so poor, if you cannot provide them with step by step instructions of exactly how to reproduce it as well as an actual solution to the problem in many cases they will promptly close the ticket and tell you "We were unable to reproduce your issue" I've received that response sometimes within minutes... suggesting they made no attempt at all to look for it. Your local cable company provides better support than oracle.
3. They intentionally deprecate features to try and prevent you from migrating to other systems. APIs, ODBC access, etc... Then offer to export the data for you for insane amounts of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars)
4. They actually sent a trainer to us to train us on how to manipulate their own support organization to work tickets. Seriously, 6hrs on how to get support to work your ticket...
5. With some products they patch, without notice, without testing. I walk in on Monday and find out a patch happened over the weekend I had no idea was going to happen, it brought several applications down. Then, when questioned about it postmortem, they actually said "Why would we notify you of these patches? There is no way they can cause a problem." When I pointed out that they just did, in fact, cause a problem, and that's why we were having this meeting, they said "Well this was a unique situation"
6. The few applications we have that aren't Oracle, keep getting bought by Oracle. Who then fires everyone, sticks their own, horrendous staff in their place and ruins a product we're locked into a 3yr contract for.
7. They have breached our contractually and legal obligated security policies no less than 7 times in the past 2 years. Not minor breaches, major ones. In one case access to hosted services they had was controlled by a whitelist. They decided, again without notice, to introduce a 2nd whitelist of API access, and default it to allow all. As a result access to the API for the service was wide open to the entire internet for months before we found out by accident what they had done. They pointed out that they had made the change public by creating a new webpage documenting the new setting, but no, they hadn't actually informed any customers the page existed and the patch that had been applied to implement the setting had been done so without any notifications being sent to anyone.

I could go on and on... but suffice it to say Oracle is the devil, they hate their customers, want to steel their money and are by far the worst Tech company I've ever dealt with. Burn in hell Oracle.

Lawsuits

[Areyoukiddingme]

I have no doubt at all that Oracle committed fraud and lied a lot. I have no doubt Oregon's project management failed to give adequate oversight to the project, failed to adequately specify the project, and repeatedly changed what little specification they provided.

Neither matters. I have no doubt this lawsuit will ultimately fail, because the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing. We're about to get a second demonstration.

Deflect Blame?

[ZeroSerenity]

"is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for their failures to manage a complex IT project." It shouldn't be their job, that's what they paid you for.

The blame lies with Oregon

[Munchr]

I have no love for Oracle, but the blame cannot be placed at their feet. As has been reported in local Oregon and nationwide news, Oracle insisted Oregon hire a project manager and systems integrator, either because the contract did not permit Oracle to fulfill those roles or Oracle was not capable of performing those roles. Oregon refused those requests, despite many warnings from Oracle and Cover Oregon's own director that without such services the site would not be ready to go live. Instead, Oregon placed a gag order on everyone involved in the project to hide the problems from the public. This is very much a problem caused by Oregon, not by any willful fraud by Oracle. This is also SOP for Oregon Government, with just about any project they undertake. (Full disclosure, I am one of many pissed off Oregonians.)

Re:The blame lies with Oregon

[bill_mcgonigle]

And to top it off, somebody in Oregon selected Oracle to be their vendor in the first place. I'll eagaerly await the replies here from folks whose experience with Oracle was that they were on-time, on-budget, went above-and-beyond in the name of customer service, and were a pleasure to work with. Too bad no company in the entire state of Oregon was qualified to build a database-backed website!

Not all states failed

[kybred]

Here's a success story about Kentucky's Kynect Exchange.

They need not have worried. Over the past year, Kentucky’s health care website has proved to be a huge success. More than a half-million Kentucky residents have signed up for the Bluegrass State’s version of Obamacare. A majority of Kentuckians approve of it. That this has happened in a deeply red state is unexpected but hardly an accident.

Good answer! Fraud is their main source of profit?

[Futurepower(R)]

Good answer: "... the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing."

Also, Oracle has been through this perhaps thousands of times. Apparently the major profit center for companies like Oracle is being late and more expensive than predicted. For example, see this quote from the book, Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment:

"... a recent General Accounting Office report on U.S. military equipment procurement concluded that only 1% of major military purchases involving high technology were delivered on time and on budget."

That book says the problem is due to a sociological mistake. My understanding is that it is entirely intended, a way of making money from the largely hidden military purchases of the U.S. government. For the U.S. government, killing people is an enormous, extremely profitable business.

Re:Driving home the point

[wizden]

How is building a website with a database back end a complex project? How does 240 million get spent and they couldn't afford a project manager? I know there are ridiculous integration requirement but this isn't exactly rocket surgery.

Re:Oracle sucks.

[umdesch4]

I'm not a PhD level database guru, but my career has been almost entirely working with databases over the last 20 years. I can say that the underlying technology of the Oracle RDBMS itself is light years beyond other systems. I'm not an advocate of anything Oracle has done in other arenas over the last 10-15 years, but I experience an existential crisis every day in my job where I love working within an Oracle database, but hate pretty much everything about the company that owns it.

Re:Because they could't sue the Government

[ShanghaiBill]

A big part of the blame should go to Oregon for trying to start with a big, complex site. Of all the states that implement Obamacare Insurance Exchanges, Oregon's is widely considered the worst, after spending $240M. Kentucky's is widely considered the best. It was ready on day one, and has run without major problems since. Kentucky spent about $8M, or 3% of what Oregon spent. Software development works best with a small, lean team of good developers. Before embarking on this project, the Oregon governor should have read The Mythical Man Month.

Re:Hire Engineers as Employees.

[PrimaryConsult]

That's what we do with Oracle and we're actually doing pretty well with them. We only let them build the dev environment, train our staff, and create documentation. The other environments are built entirely by the people they trained using the documentation provided, and once we are confident we can rebuild the system even if Oracle vanished off the face of the earth, we send the consultants on their way. This approach should be done with *any* vendor though.

Re:It's a complot

[cbhacking]

While I agree, in general, with the claims of how shitty Obamacare is...

I have friends who now have health insurance, and another who has finally been able to leave his old employer (to start his own company and become self-employed), because of Obamacare. Specifically, two of these friends are cancer survivors (throat and cervical), one has fibromyalgia, and one has a chronic autoimmune disorder whose name I forget. They wouldn't have been able to buy health insurance, otherwise; nobody was willing to offer it. So, for them personally, Obamacare *is* better than what they had before.

Of course, there are a lot of less-fucked-up ways of addressing that issue.