Kundra Former Workers Go to Jail

Two former employees of federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, back when he served as the District of Columbia's chief technology officer, have been sentenced to more than year-long prison terms for participating in a kickback scheme, according to the New York Times.

Although the scam occurred before Kundra became D.C.'s CTO in March 2007, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided his office in March 2009 shortly after the president named him federal CIO and thus embroiled him in controversy.

The investigation, however, never targeted Kundra. He has since made contractor accountability a cornerstone of the White House's information technology reform agenda.

While D.C. CTO, his office did award some contracts to a company that bribed the two employees. The Times reported:

Yusuf Acar, the former acting chief security officer in the CTO's office, was sentenced Friday to 27 months in prison in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, and Farrukh Awan, a former contract employee there, was sentenced to 14 months in prison on the same day.

The two employees, in earlier guilty pleas, said they steered work to Advanced Integrated Technologies, a Washington, D.C., IT services and outsourcing firm where Sushil Bansal served as CEO.

Acar, in his guilty plea, said he accepted bribes from Bansal on at least 59 occasions between September 2005 and March 2009, the DOJ said in a press release. Bansal paid Acar nearly US$559,000 in bribes, the DOJ said. Acar pleaded guilty in December to charges of bribery and engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity.

. . .Awan, in his guilty plea, said he worked with Acar and Bansal to steer business to Advanced Integrated Technologies between September 2005 and January 2007, the DOJ said. Awan and Acar both sat on panels responsible for assessing candidates for certain positions at the CTO's office, and they received kickbacks for each Advanced Integrated Technologies employee placed in the office, the DOJ said.

Immediately after moving from the city office to the White House, Kundra kicked off a crackdown on wasteful IT spending. In June 2009, he unveiled a public website that tracks the progress of major projects governmentwide. This summer, the Office of Management and Budget said it is using data from the so-called IT Dashboard in conjunction with meetings with key agency officials to flag about 30 high-risk projects. The goal is to get them back on track or scale them down or -- if necessary -- ax them.

OMB also has suspended all financial system modernizations until they are broken into smaller projects. The policing will continue this fall, when agencies will be required to report on subcontractor spending for the website USASpending.gov, which is supposed to monitor all federal awards.

But federal auditors in July noted the ratings on the dashboard are not always accurate. Kundra has promised to launch a new and improved dashboard that provides more analytics on federal IT investments.

We're still waiting on that one.