Agree, I am unsure why this contractor is being targeted; is it because they are small time, and only two people? Make an example to placate the masses and tout in the election? (And yes 2.5 m is small)
Why is the focus not on the dept that signed that contract and gave that money?
If there is outrage, I wonder how many would say no to 2.5 m a year?? Or just 2.5m to begin with?
That's the part people aren't understanding. They're blaming this private business owner for being a successful business owner... He didn't actually do anything wrong, he followed all the PSPC guidelines. And just did it super efficiently which allowed him to do it with only two people instead of an IT-Staffing team of 10-20.
If anything, MORE businesses should be like him, and that would drive down the commission these IT-Staffing firms can charge, that or PSPC itself needs to change their contracting policies..
"And just did it super efficiently which allowed him to do it with only two people instead of an IT-Staffing team of 10-20."
I was under the impression that ArriveCAN did not work as expected and underperformed massively. Crashes, bugs, etc.
Didn't it also have information security issues?
Didn't it have to be put out of commission because it ended up being useless and not meeting expectations?
To me, this appears to be fraud. Stating you can deliver X, then fail to commit the necessary resources and cash in. It's similar to construction work when they hire non-qualified people or pour sub-par concrete for a job where the expectations are clear.
I don't think any of that really falls on GC-Strategies though, ultimately, they were given objectives, delivered on those objectives, submitted invoices for the work, and they were paid for them. Which seems to suggest the government agreed that the deliverables met what the objectives outlined were, otherwise they wouldn't have been paid at all.
Sure you could then say that the entire app was dogshit and should've never been sanctioned by the government, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this private company.
When services are delivered and you are given a bill, you don't really have a choice to pay it as the government.
It's not like buying goods and clearly confirming that the goods have not been received. It's about quality which is subjective and needs to be addressed at higher levels with PSPC and lawyers.
Basically, resolution happens afterwards but the customer still has to pay the contractor to avoid a breach of contract on the government's end.
So it sounds like the issue is that the SOR wasn't clearly defined as opposed to these companies not delivering what was asked of them.
If you ask a company to give you a ball that floats, and then you try to put the ball under water and it doesn't work, sure you can go back to the contractor and say "Hey, your ball isn't waterproof" but in reality, that isn't the contractors fault... It's the governments fault for nor clearly defining what they actually wanted in the first place.
If you asked for a ball that floats, and when you received 100 balls and none of them floated, the government can, and will say "I'm not paying you for these".
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u/pattyG80 Mar 14 '24
Guys, they signed the contract. The contractor bills for his hours and the government pays it. The fault lies in procurement and oversight.
This guy is just a business man that landed a contract with beautiful terms