Late yesterday, the New York Times reported that the venerable computer maker Hewlett Packard settled a case with the US Government over two procurement-related ethics matters. The settlement involved a payment of $55 million from HP to the government.<\/p>\n
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The first matter involves an accusation that HP paid \u201ckickbacks to other companies that recommended federal agencies buy its products.\u201d The second matter involves a situation where HP \u201cmight have failed to provide complete pricing information during contract negotiations.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a quick glance, I couldn\u2019t find too much detail about either of these cases. But it seems to me that the Federal Government\u2019s procurement teams did too little to keep themselves on guard against suppliers\u2019 common \u201cdirty tricks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hopefully, the government will use some of that $55 million on some procurement training for their people. When everyday procurement situations end up with the threat of litigation and eight-figure settlements, it\u2019s pretty obvious that they need it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late yesterday, the New York Times reported that the venerable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n