Last year, while President Bush marshaled U.S. forces for the invasion of Iraq, the patriots at the Department of Defense awarded the contract for a new online voting system for the military... to an offshore company.
It gets worse.
Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) is the system and Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting of Enron bankruptcy fame) is the company. And although Accenture has not been officially implicated in the Enron scandal, they have created a reputation of their own that is already raising eyebrows.
This is hot off the newswire:
7/15/03 NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- Accenture Ltd., the former Andersen Consulting, disclosed Tuesday that it might have violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Chairman and CEO Joe Forehand, on an earnings call with analysts and reporters Tuesday, said the consulting firm's Middle East operations could be in non-compliance with the Act, which prohibits the bribery of foreign government officials by U.S. persons.
The Canada-based Polaris Institute published a scathing report on Accenture, saying, "Accenture's efforts in government outsourcing have often been very expensive and/or of poor quality. There is good reason to question Accenture's track record in outsourcing of government services."
Accenture is the leading offshore beneficiary of government contracts whose main business is the privatization of government services, according to Lee Drutman of Citizen Works, a non-profit founded by Ralph Nader. Accenture has a troubling track record, a close business relationship with Dick Cheney's Halliburton, and 2500 partners - more than half are not U.S. citizens.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles7/Landes_Accenture.htm