Accenture, Cisco and Sun still face kickbacks charges

IDG News Service - After recent settlements by Hewlett-Packard and EMC in a long-standing government contracting fraud case, three major IT and consulting companies are still embroiled in lawsuits brought by two former insiders.

Lawsuits alleging a widespread kickback scheme among U.S. government IT contractors remain active against Accenture, Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems, according to court documents and a lawyer for whistleblowers Norman Rille and Neal Roberts. Rille, a former manager for Accenture, and Roberts, a former partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, filed the lawsuits in 2004 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

The two whistleblowers alleged that several IT vendors and systems integrators entered into so-called alliance partnerships that provided a formal mechanism for providing kickbacks. The U.S. Department of Justice filed to join the case against HP, Sun and Accenture in April 2007.

Rille and Roberts allege that IT companies paid kickbacks to Accenture and other systems integrators in exchange for preferential treatment on government contracts the systems integrators were working on, or in exchange for strong recommendations to potential government customers.

Systems integrators are supposed to provide objective advice to government agencies, and contracting laws prohibit systems integrators from receiving anything of value for recommending the purchase of a vendor's products, said Ron Packard, a lawyer for Rille and Roberts.

In the HP case, Rille became aware of referral fees and special discounts from HP to Accenture, said Packard, of the Packard, Packard and Johnson law firm in Los Altos, California. "When Mr. Rille left his employment with Accenture, he took with him over 700,000 pages of documents, many of which involve HP," he said.

HP settled the case and another contracting complaint brought by the DOJ by agreeing to pay $55 million, the agency announced Monday. In May, EMC agreed to pay the U.S. government $87.5 million to settle similar charges.

HP denied any wrongdoing but said it was "in the best interest of our stakeholders to resolve the matter," the company said in a statement.

Computer Sciences agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle the case in May 2008. In August 2007, IBM agreed to pay just under $3 million and PricewaterhouseCoopers agreed to pay $2.3 million to settle similar complaints.

A Cisco representative declined to comment on the ongoing case.

Accenture believes it did nothing wrong, said spokesman Jim McAvoy. "Accenture is confident its alliance agreements with third-party vendors were appropriate and lawful," he said. "The government knew about alliance relationships in the IT industry, which were widely reported in the industry press. Accenture itself disclosed in proposals the fact that it had alliance agreements with IT vendors."