4 ms·

IMO the resposibility is entirely on IRS. They chose the contractor, they wrote the legal terms and conditions, they vetted them out and they presumably did the

IMO the resposibility is entirely on IRS. They chose the contractor, they wrote the legal terms and conditions, they vetted them out and they presumably did the due diligence for security.

latency-guy2 4y ago
They also provided them with training, access rights, and general governance over the data. I'd personally blame 70% of the blame on the IRS, 30% on the contractor. Organizations should not be able to skirt blame by way of contractor IMO. Hope the IRS gets fined for gross negligence and breach of data. (lol)
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  How many non-background-checked foreign employees work at Accenture on this project and have access to all these files anyway?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I strongly encourage you, without a hint of sarcasm or glib, to file a FOIA request to find out. https://muckrock.com https://muckrock.com is my weapon of choice for data liberation, but a letter or email works equally well.
acdha 4y ago
Here’s the problem: government contracting is complicated enough that only a few companies can wade through it and the overhead encourages big general services contracts so you don’t have to repeat that process every time someone wants to setup a Wordpress blog. Those companies put in bids featuring their key staff, who are qualified. That’s who the government meets with and who answers all of the questions. Contractors come and go, and the government isn’t supposed to micromanage them - that’s one of the features theoretically making them less expensive than staff - so those qualified people may never be seen after the start of the project, or they might be in some kind of “oversight” capacity where they’re quintuple booked theoretically keeping the much cheaper people doing the actual work from failing too badly. On the government side, they likely don’t have qualified technical staff (or enough of their time) after years of “cost savings” where every dollar cut from the staff budget corresponds to 2-3 dollars going to contractors. That means that problems will progress further, especially because the contract PM isn’t going to say that the contract developers are doing terribly after months of saying sprint velocity is good. Even if they’re on different contracts, the odds are good they’ve either worked together before or don’t want to rule out future work at the other company. So, things careened down the tracks and now people are realizing that the green lights on dashboards were in fact optimistic. The government can ask for things to be fixed but if there’s pushback, they risk _every_ project on that contract and it’s expensive because they have to show some kind of malfeasance to get money back or possibly even to stop wasting more (want to bet there’s never been any scope creep which could be blamed?). It’s _much_ easier to try seeing whether the claim that this was a one-time mishap was true than to deal with all of that. Any time you see something like this, it’s always possible that you have someone totally failing to do their job but it’s far more likely that you’re seeing a bunch of people trying to do their best with a system they know isn’t effective but which they have no direct means to improve.
andreareina 4y ago
That the buck stops with the IRS (agree with you there) doesn't absolve Accenture of its responsibility to the IRS.

IMO the resposibility is entirely on IRS. They chose the contractor, they wrote the legal terms and conditions, they vetted them out and they presumably did the due diligence for security.

latency-guy2 4y ago

They also provided them with training, access rights, and general governance over the data. I'd personally blame 70% of the blame on the IRS, 30% on the contractor. Organizations should not be able to skirt blame by way of contractor IMO. Hope the IRS gets fined for gross negligence and breach of data. (lol)

TechBro8615 4y ago
How many non-background-checked foreign employees work at Accenture on this project and have access to all these files anyway?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  I strongly encourage you, without a hint of sarcasm or glib, to file a FOIA request to find out. https://muckrock.com https://muckrock.com is my weapon of choice for data liberation, but a letter or email works equally well.

acdha 4y ago

Here’s the problem: government contracting is complicated enough that only a few companies can wade through it and the overhead encourages big general services contracts so you don’t have to repeat that process every time someone wants to setup a Wordpress blog. Those companies put in bids featuring their key staff, who are qualified. That’s who the government meets with and who answers all of the questions. Contractors come and go, and the government isn’t supposed to micromanage them - that’s one of the features theoretically making them less expensive than staff - so those qualified people may never be seen after the start of the project, or they might be in some kind of “oversight” capacity where they’re quintuple booked theoretically keeping the much cheaper people doing the actual work from failing too badly. On the government side, they likely don’t have qualified technical staff (or enough of their time) after years of “cost savings” where every dollar cut from the staff budget corresponds to 2-3 dollars going to contractors. That means that problems will progress further, especially because the contract PM isn’t going to say that the contract developers are doing terribly after months of saying sprint velocity is good. Even if they’re on different contracts, the odds are good they’ve either worked together before or don’t want to rule out future work at the other company. So, things careened down the tracks and now people are realizing that the green lights on dashboards were in fact optimistic. The government can ask for things to be fixed but if there’s pushback, they risk _every_ project on that contract and it’s expensive because they have to show some kind of malfeasance to get money back or possibly even to stop wasting more (want to bet there’s never been any scope creep which could be blamed?). It’s _much_ easier to try seeing whether the claim that this was a one-time mishap was true than to deal with all of that. Any time you see something like this, it’s always possible that you have someone totally failing to do their job but it’s far more likely that you’re seeing a bunch of people trying to do their best with a system they know isn’t effective but which they have no direct means to improve.

andreareina 4y ago

That the buck stops with the IRS (agree with you there) doesn't absolve Accenture of its responsibility to the IRS.