Fed IT Run By Enron's Corrupt Accountant, IT Incompetent Accenture
By
Duane Thresher, Ph.D. October 24, 2018
I am investigating the General Services Administration (GSA)
for my
IT
Incompetents Hall of Shame (ITIHOS). The GSA notoriously
does procurement, including IT services, for the
U.S. Government. As usual this investigation yielded IT
incompetents responsible for GSA's IT. But I also discovered
another connection to IT incompetence — and corruption
— as so often happens while investigating for the
ITIHOS. The GSA's longtime but retiring Chief Information
Security Officer (CISO), Kurt Garbars, who knows far more
about drinking wine than cybersecurity, is essentially having
his job outsourced to IT incompetent Accenture (CISO Nicole
Dean), which has taken over much of federal IT, including the
GSA's. Accenture used to be part of Arthur Andersen, Enron's
top-five accounting firm that was dissolved after its criminal
complicity in Enron's massive fraud. Suzette Kent, the
Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO), who I wrote about
in
You're
Fired! Trump's Worst Hire Ever: IT Incompetent Fed CIO Suzie
Kent, worked for Accenture, in Financial Services, for
almost 15 years before becoming Fed CIO, including during the
Enron scandal. She will be making decisions about federal IT
infrastructure. With GSA IT run by Accenture and with the Fed
CIO a longtime Accenture employee — and probably a
future Accenture executive — there is no question what
corporation will be running federal IT, no matter how IT
incompetent it is.
The GSA does procurement, including IT services, for the
U.S. Government. The GSA costs taxpayers $21 billion to
oversee $66 billion in procurement. If a business had
overhead that high it would be out of business and if a
charity had overhead that high it would be indicted. This
overhead is understandable given GSA's history of lavish
spending on itself (parties, etc.) and the handing out of
contracts to cronies.
Kurt
Garbars is the GSA's longtime, but recently retired, CISO,
who is IT incompetent.
An
IT education is the most important IT credential and Kurt
Garbars only has a BS in chemical engineering (this is not an
IT degree), an MBA (Master of Business Administration), a
1-year(!) Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (1-year so can't
be real) from a low-ranked college, and is working on a
Master's in viticulture and oenology in Australia. He retired
to Adelaide Australia to teach about drinking wine.
The
Government
ITIHOS photo of him drinking wine is from his own LinkedIn
page, where many government and business personnel advertise
themselves (usually by exaggerating their qualifications, like
educational background; it's always less than they imply). If
Garbars is comfortable with a photo of himself drinking on his
LinkedIn page, there must really be a party atmosphere at the
GSA.
Like the rest of its IT, the GSA essentially outsourced its
CISO to Accenture, specifically Accenture Federal Services's
CISO
Nicole
Dean, who is IT incompetent.
An
IT education is the most important IT credential and
Nicole Dean has a fake IT education. She only has a 1-year(!)
Master of Science in Management in information systems
security from Colorado Technical University. Colorado
Technical University — nothing officially to do with the
State of Colorado, although that association was probably
fraudulently intended — is a notorious
for-profit
college providing worthless educations, to employers who
are even a little knowledgeable, and worthless degrees, to
those few who can afford to pay the exorbitant tuition long
enough to get one. The federal government would not provide
educational loans to those attending CTU, so should not accept
an education from it as a qualification for government jobs,
including contractors actually doing those jobs. No other
college so essentially Dean didn't even go to
college.
Accenture Federal Services is a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Accenture. Accenture used to be part of Arthur Andersen.
Arthur Andersen was a top-five accounting firm that worked for
Enron. Enron was the electricity supply corporation (when
electricity was deregulated, it was sold as a commodity) that
turned out to be a massive fraud and did things like causing
blackouts
for millions of Californians in order to drive up the price of
electricity. Despite obvious indications, Enron was finally
exposed by a single business journalist, tipped off by a
single expert, who questioned the nonsense Enron was saying
about itself. The rest of the media, like those in
the
Media ITIHOS,
were busy declaring Enron to be an amazingly great company,
i.e., just publishing Enron's press releases.
Arthur Andersen was dissolved after it was found criminally
complicit in Enron's massive fraud, just after it spun off
Accenture. Spinning off a company does not usually change the
corporate culture, which is the hardest thing to change about
a corporation (like GSA's culture of lavish spending on itself
and its cronies). Accenture thus has a corporate culture of
incompetence and corruption, which
as
described often go together. For example, Nicole Dean
pretending she is qualified for her job is fraud. With
Accenture running federal IT, incompetence and corruption is
what the taxpayers will have for federal IT.
Like .edu domain names, .gov domain names are restricted as to
who can get them. This is to prevent fraud since a .gov web
(or email) address is a form of authentication (for example,
my contact address is
Dr.Duane.Thresher@alum.MIT.edu).
The GSA controls who gets .gov domains, so Accenture now does.
As yet there is no accenture.gov, but Enron, with Arthur
Andersen's help, was discovered to have used many
seemingly-authentic front companies to hide their fraud;
websites are often used to lend credibility to fake
companies.
Unlike everyone in federal IT, I regularly check the access
logs for my website https://apscitu.com to keep an eye on
hackers. I often come across hackers from Russia and China
trying to hack into my website (just to save them some time,
and me some costly bandwidth, the hackers should know that I
don't run PHP, MySQL, or even JavaScript on my website).
Recently I discovered IP address 159.142.0.110 looking at my
Government ITIHOS on the morning of 15 October 2018. Using an
IP to location service, I found this IP address to be in
Virginia outside of Washington D.C. and associated with an
ISP, General Services Administration. More interesting than
that though, was that the IP address was associated with the
domain name accenture.com!
As mentioned, I wrote about
Suzette
Kent, the Federal CIO, in
You're
Fired! Trump's Worst Hire Ever: IT Incompetent Fed CIO Suzie
Kent. I pointed out that she has no IT education, only a
BA in journalism or advertising and marketing, depending on
whether you believe Louisiana State University or her LinkedIn
page, respectively (did she lie on her resume?). However, I
concentrate on IT education, not experience (experience
without foundational education is meaningless, so having
worked unqualified for years is not itself a qualification,
just a condemnation of the employer;
an
IT education is the most important IT credential). I thus
didn't notice until investigating GSA IT that Kent worked for
Accenture, in Financial Services, for almost 15 years,
including during the Enron scandal (to hide her corrupt past,
on her LinkedIn page she lists working for "Accenture" even
though it was Arthur Andersen at the time; more lying on her
resume, like the fraud she commits in pretending she is
qualified to be Fed CIO).
Working for the government and then getting hired by a
corporation providing services to the government, or vice
versa, and then maybe back and forth again — always to
increasingly lucrative positions — is standard procedure
in corrupt government. It's called the
revolving
door. Suzie Kent will be the Fed CIO for a few years and
make sure her former longtime employer Accenture, even as IT
incompetent as it is, gets most or all of the contracts to
supply the U.S. Government with IT services. Then later she
will leave the government and go back to a very lucrative
executive position at Accenture. There will be no provable
quid pro quo but it will be obvious to anyone who is not an
idiot that there was one. Taxpayers, and their children and
grandchildren, will be left with the bill for billions of
dollars and an IT incompetent government that can't and won't
help and protect them. This will inevitably lead to the
collapse of the government. If you think it can't happen to
the U.S. Government then you are delusionally ignorant of
history.