Thursday, March 12, 2009

H-1B CEO Busted in Federal Bribery Sting: FBI Raids Obama Appointee's Office

FBI Raid Arrests 2 at Obama Appointee’s Office



WASHINGTON - FBI agents on Thursday arrested two men in a bribery sting and searched the city's technology office, recently led by President Obama's recently appointed computer chief, Vivek Kundra.


On March 5, Obama named D.C. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vivek Kundra as the federal government's Chief Information Officer (CIO). Funny timing...Kundra's last day was March 4. He was in charge of technology in the District since 2007, and has also been a consultant to Obama since he won the election. Kundra has now taken a leave from his position until further details become known of the FBI's investigation into Kundra's Washington, D.C. IT offices.


A private contractor and an employee of the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer Administration were both arrested in a federal bribery sting, involving Sushil Bansal, President and CEO of BPO outsourcing firm Advanced Integrated Technologies Corporation (AITC) receiving $350,000 in .Net Development Support and Peoplesoft Consulting Support contracts from the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Office.

A direct report to Kundra, Yusuf Acar, 40, an employee of the D.C. Office of the CTO was also taken into custody by FBI agents at his home in Northwest D.C. FBI agents found $70,000 in Acar's Northwest D.C. home when they arrested him Thursday morning.


Government records show Bansal is not a U.S. citizen and holds an H-1B visa, which is given to foreign workers in “specialty occupations” most notably the technology sector. And what “specialty occupations” might U.S. corporations and government agencies need to fill right now, with millions of white collar technology professionals losing their jobs to cheap foreign workers? For starters, knowing how and who to contact in Washington’s pay-to-play culture appears to still be en vogue around the Hill.


Bansal’s company, AITC has also received contracts from the D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles. In 2008, he also received the Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Association of Indians in America, according to AITC's Web site. According to Bansal’s bio on the website, prior experience to founding his “fast growing IT consulting firm” involved working in several IT project management capacities implementing financial systems, including the Department of Homeland Security, the organization that dedicates itself to replacing American white collar professionals with cheap labor from India:


“He also worked with AMS-CGI and SAIC and provided IT consulting and project management services to the Department of Defense, US Navy, Department of Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, the Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Federal Communications Commission, and several other civilian federal agencies.”


While millions of American computer science and IT professionals are losing their jobs due to corrupt and greedy cheap labor lobby hiring policies that our government officials seem to sanction, we can also thank pompous and out of touch journalists like Tom Friedman for promoting the inhumane meme that this “bunch of losers” known as American citizens are not worth hiring. (For a superb analysis on the Great American Labor Shortage Myth, read Citizen Carrie’s The Ross School of Outsourcing, where this “Detroit housewife” mops the floor with the butt end of the William Davidson Institute and Tom Lantos professor of business administration at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.")



President Obama has pledged to make transparency and government acquisition a priority, and appointing CIOs who pander to the corporate driven status quo agenda and cheap labor lobby at the expense of millions of unemployed and underemployed American technology professionals is not the best practice for Obama to seize this opportunity - unless of course, he also has some serious$ skin in the game. Is it too much to ask that this president starts choosing to make the right appointments for the sake of American citizens who worked so hard to build this great country by demanding a political and business culture of integrity, trust and credibility from his agency leaders and cabinet? Will this administration dwarf the previous one in its corrupt, pay-to-play culture?


Corporate America Code Blue…Meanwhile, American technologists, many with advanced degrees - are being told they need to be retrained -- but it is the CEOs and vc’s who need the retraining. It is high-time to deliver anti-sociopathic training skills and seminars to corporate, academic, and beltway “thought leaders” who have, since the nineties, been responsible for ruining the lives of millions of computer science and IT professionals. This ruse of a “skilled labor shortage” has been well-documented.


Let’s hope Obama’s team takes a few house cleaning tips from our friend, Citizen Carrie, who, in her aforementioned post, offers a detailed account of the inhumane hiring practices geared to kick Americans to the curb in favor for cheap, imported labor and provides a few suggestions to cure this sick house of corporate America’s love of the cheap labor lobby infected with the Hubris Disease.

-2Truthy

11 comments:

Citizen Carrie said...

Thanks for great post, 2Truthy! This is one of those stories I kept hearing about in the background but I didn't get around to looking into. It's even worse than I thought, since this involves power-brokering among all of the top U.S. agencies! Kundra would have been the best person to keep all the wheels greased, wouldn't he have?

I wonder, in what way would the U.S. have lost its competetive edge if Bansal was never given an H-1B visa? I'm also seriously thinking that the U.S. needs to disperse their government agencies and even their cabinet offices throughout the U.S. for two reasons. One, so workers wouldn't have to leave their homes and endure the stench of D.C. just to get employment, and two, to make it that much harder for the government contract parasites to go from office-to-office handing out their bribes.

Citizen Carrie said...

I used "power-brokering" in my comment last night. I think "influence-peddling" is the better phrase.

Anonymous said...

An H-1b involved in a scam? Noooooooo! tell me it isnt so! They're super smart! They're here to 'save' us


LOL

2Truthy said...

Haha,see below the jobs of the future listing!

Well kids, it's looking like all of those over-educated and underemployed Americans just don't get it -- particularly, those whiny IT bunnies who don't do the hubris who never took the class for sociopaths called "How to Succeed in Business Without Even Working."

Rather than apply for jobs that read "Networking Engineer" or "Linux Guru" or "Financial Analyst", it's time to start reaching for the brass ring and do searches for serious job titles that guarantee a healthy ROI like

-Director of Influence Peddling
-Money Laundering Manager - 2 positions (New Delhi & D.C.)
-Power Broker
-Senior Bribery Account Manager
-V.P. Tax Cheating
-H.R.(pronounced 'whore')Director - 2 positions - Sand Hill Road and Pennsylvania Ave. locations)

CC, Although K Street and The Hill could certainly use a big garlic clove around its corrupted neck and perhaps a priest to exorcise the greed and hubris demons, it seems to me that the power is already being increasingly scattered (Wall Street, Sand Hill Road, the growing Gre$n and Ethanol Belts and, as you pointed out in your great Ross School of Outsourcing post, the Universities and think tanks all across the country seem to own the local Congress crack whores)and as this Kundra/Obie White House story proves, these guys are sanctioned from the top down.

Still, I must agree with you that if these Congress and Senate "leaders" were decentralized and local, that could improve accountability and transparency but only if the people demanded it of them. But how do you demand civility at the local level when the corporate greedsters (literally) own the podium? One example of this problem here is, Barbara Boxer is our state senator who we are supposed to 'write' to demand these local corporations (Intel, Cisco, Oracle, Google, etc.) to stop insourcing, start a hire Americans first hiring program and to stop age discrimination. But these CEOS and investors are friends of hers and her family members. Go further down the chain to local Anna Eshoo, and she is in the sheets with this bunch, too.

I'd go one step further to say that we need to start electing members of the non-portfolio class who don't pander to One Big Money Party to government office at the local and federal levels if we ever want to see positive change.

Tunnel Rat said...

Way to go 2TRTruthy! This Kundra scandal is going to be the Tonkin Gulf of the anti-H[indu]-1B insurgency.

Thanks for writing about it articulately.

And the please by the PC crowd to write our representatives are BS. I have faxed and emailed Boxer and Feinstien numerous times and heard nothing.

Time for a guerilla war.

Welcome to the insurgency.

Citizen Carrie said...

Did you see Acar's resume that Reese posted?

http://www.bradreese.com/acar-resume.pdf

The guy misspelled February "Fabuary", and says he's fluent in Turkish and Russian. Just the type of guy I want to see as a security chief in Washington D.C.

Tunnel Rat said...

2Truthy: I get the same "Come on, give 'em a break, English is their second language" every time I complain about some semi-literate email from a slumdog or Desi recruiter. The comments section of my blog got flooded with Pidgin English until I shamed them into using punctuation and a spell-checker.

We are dealing with a semi-literate force of indentured servants that somehow feels entitled to every good white-collar job in I.T.

2Truthy said...

"We are dealing with a semi-literate force of indentured servants that somehow feels entitled to every good white-collar job in I.T."

TR, isn't it interesting how we are told that Indians are native English speakers, when in fact theirs is a Hindi speaking country with many, many other non-English languages also spoken? So many of them barely understand (let alone read and write) the English language when they get here, but I guess corporate "leaders" know more than us about what constitutes product development and service delivery quality, eh?

Anonymous said...

Can we ever expect leaders at the federal level to stop selling out our jobs? It would be great if California's senator would stand up to corporate America to stop outsourcing jobs?

Anonymous said...

Economic Populist has a good article and comment thread here.
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/obamas-cio-vivek-kundra-previous-close-employees-arrested-fraud-bribery

Merchantville NJ said...

Why is there so much fraud coming out of NJ? Why have so many good US jobs gone to imported workers when US professionals need those jobs instead?
It must have to do with the high concentration of financial services firms which were one of the first segments to jump on the cheap labor lobby bandwagon, even if those imported workers were sub-par in knowledge, education, morality and honesty.