Can yall break down this whole arrivescam thing?
What’s the issue? It wasn’t protecting folks info or some shyt?
Taxpayers may never know the true cost of ArriveCAN, which
went from $80,000 at conception, to $2.35 million, to almost $60 million
inadequate documentation for the way non-competitive contracts were awarded for ArriveCAN, a lack of controls as subcontractors were hired, as opposed to using in-house public servants and costs ballooned, as well as a failure to disclose that some CBSA employees attended dinners and other events offered by contractors
During the pandemic, 10,200 fully vaccinated Canadians were wrongly ordered to quarantine for 14 days — at risk of heavy fines — because of erroneous information sent to them through the ArriveCAN app, possibly the result of inadequate or non-existent testing.
Instead of using the federal government’s ample in-house IT resources to design and implement this new app, the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) decided to contract out the work.
The result, Canada’s Auditor-General (AG) has
just reported, was a costly fiasco, woefully deficient in basic accountability safeguards.
The government used, in total, more than 30 contractors for the ArriveCan project.
The AG report lists, by name, the 11 companies which charged more than $1 million. The remaining 21 firms are lumped together as “others”.
The total bill, the AG estimates, was close to $60 million.
Of that sum, over $19 million went to a four-person Ottawa firm called GC Strategies. That company, founded less than a decade ago, is now the focus of intense scrutiny.
The Montreal newspap
er La Presse reports that GC Strategies has received close to $258 million in federal government contracts since 2015.
What the tiny company has done for all that money is something of a mystery.
In the case of information technology services – software development and similar activities – GC Strategies does not appear to provide tangible, technical high-tech products. From what we can gather, its role has been to act as a sort of middleman. It identifies government IT requirements and then helps civil servants find other firms which are qualified to do the actual work.
Just a big disaster
