"consists of 43 data centres around the UK,"
wtf?! No wonder they waste so much money. Surely they could consolidate in a couple.
The Ministry of Justice has extended yet another chunk of its mega National Offender Management IT contracts, in a further sign the department is struggling to break away from its decade-long big IT agreements. The Offender Management National Infrastructure consists of 43 data centres around the UK, and was a 10-year deal …
HMRC only hassle the "little people" for tax, make huge amounts of cash & you owe essentially sweet FA (unless you are someone with a few morals such as Rowling, Dyson etc. who chose not to join the tax "avoidance" merry go round touted by accountancy firms that are cosy with govt)
So, the magic touch is to be v. wealthy ;-)
Not really, most self employed "Consultants" have tax avoidance schemes that mean they pay little or no income tax. It's mostly the PAYE employees who get screwed.
Self employed can write off a proportion (up to 100%) of all sorts of stuff against their earnings, including any personal IT, stationary, domestic office space (The spare bedroom). Whilst PAYE get to pay for it all.
BTW. Just wait till the PAC find out which departments have Tower contracts that pay companies to do nothing at all.
You do realize that if they have enough expenses to actually write off 100% of their earnings they aren't making any money, right?
That depends on the extent to which expenditure which the conslutant would have made anyway in a personal capacity can be re-categorised as an allowable expense. Personally I am just as much of a tight-arse with the company's money as with my own
Did you hear the one about the Home Office?
Their head of IT Architecture Profession apparently knows nothing about technology. A career civil servant of the worst kind - hanging on until retirement. That's how you spend £350m on Integrated Case Working and deliver nothing of value.
And the list goes on .. project managers who wouldn't know the price of milk... Major programmes with more consultants than public servants ... Infighting ... Suppliers who charge £80,000 to change abfew spreadsheet cells ...
Guss where the old CIO went? After presiding over a 15 year contract with Fujitsu, extended at least twice... ? She went where they all go. Rainmaker.
For some reason you haven't reported it yet, but HP have recently signed a two year contract extension for the MOJ/NOMS account. This is not a transition to FITS contract, but a straight up extension for all areas except the bit which already moved to vodafone.
I'd say it's safe to say FITS is dead!
Oracle has been sued by Plexada System Integrators in Nigeria for alleged breach of contract and failure to pay millions of dollars said to be owed for assisting with a Lagos State Government IT contract.
Plexada is seeking almost $56 million in denied revenue, damages, and legal costs for work that occurred from 2015 through 2020.
A partner at Plexada, filed a statement with the Lagos State High Court describing the dispute. The document, provided to The Register, accuses Oracle of retaliating against Plexada and trying to ruin the firm's business for seeking to be paid.
The world's governments are eager to let someone else handle their IT headaches, according to a recent Gartner report, which found a healthy appetite for "anything-as-a-service" (XaaS) platforms to cut the costs of bureaucracy.
These trends will push government IT spending to $565 billion in 2022, up 5 percent from last year, the analyst house claims. Gartner believes the majority of new government IT investments will be on service platforms by 2026.
"The pandemic sped up public-sector adoption of cloud solutions and the XaaS model for accelerated legacy modernization and new service implementations," Gartner analyst Daniel Snyder said in a release. "Fifty-four percent of government CIOs responding to the 2022 Gartner CIO survey indicated that they expect to allocate additional funding to cloud platforms in 2022, while 35 percent will decrease investments in legacy infrastructure and datacenter technologies."
American lawmakers held a hearing on Tuesday to discuss a proposed federal information privacy bill that many want yet few believe will be approved in its current form.
The hearing, dubbed "Protecting America's Consumers: Bipartisan Legislation to Strengthen Data Privacy and Security," was overseen by the House Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Therein, legislators and various concerned parties opined on the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) [PDF], proposed by Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Representatives Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA).
A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Inverse Finance has been robbed of cryptocurrency somehow exchangeable for $1.2 million, just two months after being taken for $15.6 million.
"Inverse Finance’s Frontier money market was subject to an oracle price manipulation incident that resulted in a net loss of $5.83 million in DOLA with the attacker earning a total of $1.2 million," the organization said on Thursday in a post attributed to its Head of Growth "Patb."
And Inverse Finance would like its funds back. Enumerating the steps the DAO intends to take in response to the incident, Patb said, "First, we encourage the person(s) behind this incident to return the funds to the Inverse Finance DAO in return for a generous bounty."
A former Maryland Cabinet-level official and a former IT executive have pleaded guilty to involvement in a bribery and extortion scheme related to technology contracts about a decade ago.
According to the US Attorney's Office of the State of Maryland, Isabel FitzGerald, 52, of Annapolis, Maryland, and Kenneth Coffland, 67, of Riva, Maryland, pleaded guilty last week to charges of bribery and extortion, respectively. They were indicted in 2017.
From 2009 through September 2011, Coffland worked [PDF] at ACS, which held a $129 million IT hosting contract and $229 million applications contract with the State of Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR). ACS, acquired by Xerox in 2010, managed the datacenter that hosted DHR applications for administering welfare benefits under federal and state programs.
A woman in the US has been charged with murder after she allegedly tracked down her boyfriend using an Apple AirTag and ran him over after seeing him with another lady.
Gaylyn Morris, 26, found her partner Andre Smith, also 26, at Tilly’s Pub in an Indianapolis shopping mall with the help of the gadget in the early hours of June 3, it is claimed.
A witness said Morris had driven up to him in the parking lot and inquired whether Smith was in the bar, stating she had a GPS tracker that showed he was inside, according to an affidavit [PDF] by Detective Gregory Shue. Morris, the witness said, subsequently spotted Smith within the establishment.
The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.
"When it comes to how people use mobile phones, Apple and Google hold all the cards," said Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, in a statement. "As good as many of their services and products are, their strong grip on mobile ecosystems allows them to shut out competitors, holding back the British tech sector and limiting choice."
The decision to open a formal investigation follows the CMA's year-long study of the mobile ecosystem. The competition watchdog's findings have been published in a report that concludes Apple and Google have a duopoly that limits competition.
An Australian digital driver's license (DDL) implementation that officials claimed is more secure than a physical license has been shown to easily defaced, but authorities insist the credential remains secure.
New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, launched its DDL program in 2019, and as of 2021 officials there said that slightly more than half of the state's eight million people use the "Service NSW" app that displays the DDL and offers access to many other government services.
Now, a security researcher at cybersecurity company Dvuln claims he was able to brute force his way into the app with nothing but a Python script and a consumer laptop. Once inside, he found numerous security flaws that made it simple to alter the DDL stored in the app.
Services giant Infosys has had a difficult week, with one of its flagship projects wobbling and India's government continuing to pressure it over labor practices.
The troublesome project is India's portal for filing Goods and Services Tax returns. According to India's Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), the IT services giant reported a "technical glitch" that meant auto-populated forms weren't ready for taxpayers. The company was directed to fix it and CBIC was faced with extending due dates for tax payments.
A California Right to Repair bill, SB 983, died in committee last week, despite broad consumer support for fixable products.
It's not clear who killed the bill, but Right to Repair advocates point to the usual suspects – the tech companies that benefit by controlling who can repair their goods and that have lobbied against Right to Repair bills all over the US.
"It happened in the most shadowy, unaccountable part of the process, so it's hard to know exactly what happened," said Nathan Proctor, US Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) senior Right to Repair campaign director, in a message to The Register.
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