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UN Wastes $3 Million on 30,000 Oracle Licenses Left Unused,
Sources Say, As Budget Committee Meets, No Ban Comment
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis
UNITED NATIONS,
December 22 -- The UN purchased 30,000 licenses
from Oracle
to a computer program called Seibel, a so-called Customer Relations
Management
(CRM) system. The contract is for $7.5 million, of which over $3
million have already
been paid to Oracle. But the licenses have never been used, according
to UN
computer system personnel.
These
whistleblowers, outraged at the waste and of
accountability they say is pervasive, have directed Inner City Press to
the
documentary evidence of the phantom contract. Click here to view
the listing of
Oracle's $7,581,607 contract PD/C0025/07; click
here
to view
the UN's intranet's presentation that
"implementation is expected to begin in June 2006," which has yet to
occur despite the outlay of $3,073,214.
In the UN's online Procurement database, the
information about the Seibel purchase from Oracle is substantially less
detailed than from other purchases. For other purchases, the
specifications of
the procurement are online, often dozens of pages. For this purchase
from
Oracle, there are no online specifications. Click here.
Internal whistleblowers tell Inner City
Press that worse than the mis-management that led to the purchase of
30,000
licenses well before they would or even could be used is the cover-up
that has
occurred afterwards. They also identify as problematic the UN's
contracting
with EMC Corporation to purchase licenses for a program called
Documentum,
ostensibly to replace the UN's Official Document System for the UN's
"Enterprise Content Management" system, ECM.
The flawed
contracting began under the tenure of Eduardo Blinder, who has since
migrated
to the
even less overseen International Computing Center, to which the UN
Secretariat outsources much of its work and procurement. More recently, the person responsible for the
waste is the Officer in Charge who replaced Blinder, Chandramouli
Ramanathan.
In the UN's basement, Ban Ki-moon's
Secretariat's CRM and ECM are being considered for the UN's Fifth
(Budgetary)
Committee. But the Committee members have never been informed of the
waste that
has occurred. Nor has the Office of
Internal Oversight Services, embroiled in its own scandal, done
anything.
UN's Ban Ki-moon and computer
monitors, this oversight not given to Oracle CRM contract
In a draft of the pending resolution provided
to Inner City Press by a budget committee source, the Secretary-General
is
criticized for proceeding with CRM and ECM before making any proposal
to the
General Assembly.
Inner City Press has asked Ban's spokesperson
Michele Montas about this critique from the General Assembly. Video here. Ms.
Montas said she would have no comment at all until after the Assembly
vote on
the resolution which she said might not take place until Christmas Eve.
Watch this site.
Click here from Inner City Press'
December 12 debate on UN double standards
Click here for Inner
City Press' November 25 debate on Somalia, politics
Click here for Inner City
Press Nov. 7 debate on the war in Congo
Watch this site, and this Oct. 2 debate, on
UN, bailout, MDGs
and this October 17 debate, on
Security Council and Obama and the UN.
* * *
These
reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here
for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali
National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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