Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is taking Oracle to court.
The state of Oregon — my home state, go fightin’ rain and trees — is unhappy with the performance of the website that Oracle built for its Obamacare rollout. The site, frankly, didn’t work as expected.
The cost of the Oracle effort? Hundreds of millions of dollars. The best part to all of this is Oracle recently sued Oregon for $23 million more for its work. According to Bloomberg, current Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber in May “asked the state attorney general to take legal action against” Oracle to get its money.
This one won’t be over soon, and it will not be pretty. The complaint from the state of Oregon is blistering:
“Over the last three years, Oracle has presented the State and Cover Oregon with some $240,280,008 in false claims under those contracts. Oracle’s conduct amounts to a pattern of racketeering activity that has cost the State and Cover Oregon hundreds of millions of dollars. Accordingly, plaintiff Ellen Rosenblum, the Attorney General for the State of Oregon, along with the State and Cover Oregon, brings this lawsuit to recover losses to the State and Cover Oregon caused by Oracle’s fraud, racketeering, false claims, and broken contracts.
When Oracle couldn’t show a working website by September 2013 — Obamacare kicked off in October of that year — the state realized that, according to the complaint, “Oracle’s assurances were worthless.”
It gets better:
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Oracle sold the State of Oregon a lie. According to a former Oracle employee, “There was no solution.” The cobbled together collection of products that Oracle called the “Oracle Solution” was not flexible, was not integrated, and most importantly, did not work “out-of-the-box.” Oracle’s 2010 and 2011 claims to DHS and OHA were patently and categorically false.
As this rolls along we’ll keep you posted. For now, Oracle isn’t looking that great.
Jon Stewart, take us home:
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