9 ms·

Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without g

by aasasd 6y ago

Reads like a copy of Russian government contract practices. Put up a contest, list requirements in such a way that only one company would satisfy them without going bust or mad, award the contract to that company. ‘Make the thing using this and that technologies’ does appear regularly.

smsm42 6y ago
Russia at some point instituted a law that all contracts have to be published in a centralized database. So, to award contracts to specific companies, an array of techniques was developed to prevent anyone from using that database to bid on those contracts. The names of the goods are misspelled, spelled using a mix of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, the items are required to be of specific model with tiny modification from common one that only one (pre-arranged) provider happens to have, unusual names are used for goods, etc. etc. It's a whole branch of art now.
pessimizer 6y ago
It's absurdly common and has nothing to do with Russia other than plenty of Russians also do it. The reason you pay more to get a political job than political jobs pay is because you get control of contracts. Contracts get you rich. edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.
- aasasd 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm pretty sure we don't have a monopoly on such practices, only couldn't remember if I ever read about Western procedures and misconducts with these contests. Dunno even what they're properly called—it's a ‘tender’ here. However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...
  - Jare 6y ago
    Also its less spectacular but more long term, "revolving door".
    - aasasd 6y ago
      That term I do know, generally speaking. It's particularly associated for me with the industrial band Pigface.
brtkdotse 6y ago
There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person. Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.
- echelon 6y ago
  Do you have a link to the story? That sounds both hilarious and disappointing.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    A quick google search didn't give me much but I found this https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-by-officer-with-faked-diploma https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-...
    - fallingknife 6y ago
      > He rose to the rank of major despite not having completed mandatory training, and was even temporarily promoted to be able to serve at the military alliance headquarters, the newspaper said. Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.
  - brtkdotse 6y ago
    Couldn’t find an English version, but I’m sure you can run it through a translate and get the gist of it https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny-chef-skulle-rekryteras-1.28832487 https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...
  - anon4242 6y ago
    Here's a link in Swedish: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/70eXyK/forsvarsmaktens-tabbe-i-jobbannonsen--bryter-mot-lagen https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/70eXyK/forsvarsmaktens-... Under the first bullet in the screendump in the article it says: * Experience from personnel management positions and documented good leadership qualities (Here Henric lacks the clear experience why I think it should be moved to meritorious)
tw20212021 6y ago
Not Russia but eastern Europe. A long time ago I was working at this company 'subscribed' to government contracts. There was a new project for the army/nato and my colleague was writing our bid offer. Right next to him sat an army officer whispering him exactly what to write down to win the bid. Needless to say all public contracts where won by a small group of companies in the same manner. But sometimes the bribes were even higher, and companies hq-ed in central and western Europe, like IBM and the likes, would win the contracts and then sub-contract my company to do the work.
philjohn 6y ago
This is endemic in tender processes the world over. I used to work in a role where I had to respond to tenders for the software I led, and it was obvious that if the requirements list wasn’t written by our competitor, the institution had decided they wanted their software and listed every feature they knew only that company offered.
- pm90 6y ago
  Seems like the software procurement process itself is broken. I guess this could happen with hardware too. But adding more features is much easier in software. Marketing can then argue that it makes a certain product “better”.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    It’s not just software. Military hardware procurement is also notoriously corrupt, ditto with local infrastructure projects.
komuher 6y ago
Sounds like poland and hungary today :)
ThinkBeat 6y ago
This is quite common in the US. For a while my entire job ended up writing proposals and all the related nonsense for federal an state government contracts. I did not like that one bit. However spending week after week trying to divine the meaning behind phrases and terms. It shortly became apparent that some parts of the government would consistently have requirements only applicable to one vendor. That saved a lot of time since I could just skip them whenever they came out. These types of «arrangements” often go all the way to congress promised pork for donors and secure job for voters. If I have given the impression I was doing all the work myself that is not intended. We had a big team of all sorts of disciplines
- sul_tasto 6y ago
  What I don’t understand is why auditors can’t or won’t put a stop to this.
  - p_l 6y ago
    It's hard to put down a technically legal, as far as text of law goes, practice. Especially when there are no complaints to use as a base because all contenders for the contract were similarly shady. And sometimes some $RANDOM gets the contract because nobody serious will take it, thanks to anti-corruption/anti-loss measures that the populous voted in that made the contract impossible. So Honest John Federal takes the contract and finds a suitably desperate student/outsources it to cheapest vendor possible. Meanwhile auditors (unless burned out) would love to get the contractors and buyer staked in court, but technically all checkboxes on the checklist are checked (pun intended) and there's no obvious better candidate to use as counter example.
user3939382 6y ago
Reminds me of an RFP for the Pennsylvania Land Trust Assocation I spent $10k preparing a bid for when I was young and naïve before I understood that RFPs were often a sham to give auditors the illusion of due diligence and that it would have been impossible for us to win the contract.
eplanit 6y ago
It reminds me of how during the Iraq war (fiasco), Halliburton, partly owned by dick Cheney, was awarded a huge "no bid" contract (no competitor by design, no bid required) for logistical support in Iraq. No corruption to see here folks, move along.
mgkimsal 6y ago
That's nothing to do with Russia. I had a client make an RFP based on my company's service specs. The entire intent (stated behind the scenes) was to have us get the work. We'd already done other work - they wanted to keep us involved for the next phase of work. We lost to someone local. They charged basically the same as we did, but they were local so didn't have to include travel costs, so they 'won'. The client lost out because there was no consideration for continuation of knowledge/experience - we'd done an initial training course for them - our teams knew each other and had done some informal prototyping already while on site. But... "the other bid was lower".
ineedasername 6y ago
It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract. The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.
- quickthrowman 6y ago
  > it reads a bit like any government contract. I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI. I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either. Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    It's good this doesn't occur in all areas, but at least for software systems (the area of vendor contracts I'm familiar with) it's not uncommon. A vendor provides an opaque system that requires relatively deep knowledge of it to perform integrations etc. A third party would need to dig deep into the system & documentation to work with it. I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1]. Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation. Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehigheredcio.com/2012/03/28/sungard-ellucian-still-suing-cajana-and-nscc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehi... [1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-major-savings-on-vital-software-lures-colleges/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-...
bsaul 6y ago
Russian government certainly doesn’t have the monopoly of that kind of practice. It’s a standard practice in wordlbank projects as well : wordlbank finances the development of a system in a foreign country, and the projects requirements are written in such a way that only US companies can answer.
enigma20 6y ago
This also happens a lot in some European countries, where governments/municipalities buy/lease cars for. They specify features list in the way, that only one car model form particular manufacturer matches the requirements. Pure corruption.

by aasasd 6y ago

smsm42 6y ago

Russia at some point instituted a law that all contracts have to be published in a centralized database. So, to award contracts to specific companies, an array of techniques was developed to prevent anyone from using that database to bid on those contracts. The names of the goods are misspelled, spelled using a mix of Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, the items are required to be of specific model with tiny modification from common one that only one (pre-arranged) provider happens to have, unusual names are used for goods, etc. etc. It's a whole branch of art now.

pessimizer 6y ago

It's absurdly common and has nothing to do with Russia other than plenty of Russians also do it. The reason you pay more to get a political job than political jobs pay is because you get control of contracts. Contracts get you rich. edit: Speaking from direct American government experience.

aasasd 6y ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure we don't have a monopoly on such practices, only couldn't remember if I ever read about Western procedures and misconducts with these contests. Dunno even what they're properly called—it's a ‘tender’ here. However, I'm familiar with the term ‘kickback’...
- Jare 6y ago
  Also its less spectacular but more long term, "revolving door".
  - aasasd 6y ago
    That term I do know, generally speaking. It's particularly associated for me with the industrial band Pigface.

brtkdotse 6y ago

There was some hubbub in Sweden a while back about the armed forces putting up a _really_ specific job ad, like it was tailored to one person. Well, it turned out it was, because the person posting the add forgot to take out the phrase “Make sure Björn meets these requirements” in the middle of the ad.

echelon 6y ago
Do you have a link to the story? That sounds both hilarious and disappointing.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  A quick google search didn't give me much but I found this https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-by-officer-with-faked-diploma https://www.france24.com/en/20200115-swedish-military-duped-...
  - fallingknife 6y ago
    > He rose to the rank of major despite not having completed mandatory training, and was even temporarily promoted to be able to serve at the military alliance headquarters, the newspaper said. Sounds like they could save a lot of money getting rid of the training requirement.
- brtkdotse 6y ago
  Couldn’t find an English version, but I’m sure you can run it through a translate and get the gist of it https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny-chef-skulle-rekryteras-1.28832487 https://www.gp.se/nyheter/västsverige/militär-blunder-när-ny...
- anon4242 6y ago
  Here's a link in Swedish: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/70eXyK/forsvarsmaktens-tabbe-i-jobbannonsen--bryter-mot-lagen https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/70eXyK/forsvarsmaktens-... Under the first bullet in the screendump in the article it says: * Experience from personnel management positions and documented good leadership qualities (Here Henric lacks the clear experience why I think it should be moved to meritorious)

tw20212021 6y ago

Not Russia but eastern Europe. A long time ago I was working at this company 'subscribed' to government contracts. There was a new project for the army/nato and my colleague was writing our bid offer. Right next to him sat an army officer whispering him exactly what to write down to win the bid. Needless to say all public contracts where won by a small group of companies in the same manner. But sometimes the bribes were even higher, and companies hq-ed in central and western Europe, like IBM and the likes, would win the contracts and then sub-contract my company to do the work.

philjohn 6y ago

This is endemic in tender processes the world over. I used to work in a role where I had to respond to tenders for the software I led, and it was obvious that if the requirements list wasn’t written by our competitor, the institution had decided they wanted their software and listed every feature they knew only that company offered.

pm90 6y ago
Seems like the software procurement process itself is broken. I guess this could happen with hardware too. But adding more features is much easier in software. Marketing can then argue that it makes a certain product “better”.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It’s not just software. Military hardware procurement is also notoriously corrupt, ditto with local infrastructure projects.

komuher 6y ago

Sounds like poland and hungary today :)

ThinkBeat 6y ago

This is quite common in the US. For a while my entire job ended up writing proposals and all the related nonsense for federal an state government contracts. I did not like that one bit. However spending week after week trying to divine the meaning behind phrases and terms. It shortly became apparent that some parts of the government would consistently have requirements only applicable to one vendor. That saved a lot of time since I could just skip them whenever they came out. These types of «arrangements” often go all the way to congress promised pork for donors and secure job for voters. If I have given the impression I was doing all the work myself that is not intended. We had a big team of all sorts of disciplines

sul_tasto 6y ago
What I don’t understand is why auditors can’t or won’t put a stop to this.
- p_l 6y ago
  It's hard to put down a technically legal, as far as text of law goes, practice. Especially when there are no complaints to use as a base because all contenders for the contract were similarly shady. And sometimes some $RANDOM gets the contract because nobody serious will take it, thanks to anti-corruption/anti-loss measures that the populous voted in that made the contract impossible. So Honest John Federal takes the contract and finds a suitably desperate student/outsources it to cheapest vendor possible. Meanwhile auditors (unless burned out) would love to get the contractors and buyer staked in court, but technically all checkboxes on the checklist are checked (pun intended) and there's no obvious better candidate to use as counter example.

user3939382 6y ago

Reminds me of an RFP for the Pennsylvania Land Trust Assocation I spent $10k preparing a bid for when I was young and naïve before I understood that RFPs were often a sham to give auditors the illusion of due diligence and that it would have been impossible for us to win the contract.

eplanit 6y ago

It reminds me of how during the Iraq war (fiasco), Halliburton, partly owned by dick Cheney, was awarded a huge "no bid" contract (no competitor by design, no bid required) for logistical support in Iraq. No corruption to see here folks, move along.

mgkimsal 6y ago

That's nothing to do with Russia. I had a client make an RFP based on my company's service specs. The entire intent (stated behind the scenes) was to have us get the work. We'd already done other work - they wanted to keep us involved for the next phase of work. We lost to someone local. They charged basically the same as we did, but they were local so didn't have to include travel costs, so they 'won'. The client lost out because there was no consideration for continuation of knowledge/experience - we'd done an initial training course for them - our teams knew each other and had done some informal prototyping already while on site. But... "the other bid was lower".

ineedasername 6y ago

It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract. The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.

quickthrowman 6y ago
> it reads a bit like any government contract. I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI. I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either. Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  It's good this doesn't occur in all areas, but at least for software systems (the area of vendor contracts I'm familiar with) it's not uncommon. A vendor provides an opaque system that requires relatively deep knowledge of it to perform integrations etc. A third party would need to dig deep into the system & documentation to work with it. I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1]. Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation. Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehigheredcio.com/2012/03/28/sungard-ellucian-still-suing-cajana-and-nscc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150319233444/http://blog.thehi... [1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-major-savings-on-vital-software-lures-colleges/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-small-company-promising-...

bsaul 6y ago

Russian government certainly doesn’t have the monopoly of that kind of practice. It’s a standard practice in wordlbank projects as well : wordlbank finances the development of a system in a foreign country, and the projects requirements are written in such a way that only US companies can answer.

enigma20 6y ago

This also happens a lot in some European countries, where governments/municipalities buy/lease cars for. They specify features list in the way, that only one car model form particular manufacturer matches the requirements. Pure corruption.