The IRS spaffed $12m on Office 365 subscription IT NEVER USED

Re: My government...

Or some other more important things? Like saving peoples lives in emergency services?

Re: Your tax dollars at work!

No, it is work.

Incompetence is what they throw in for free.

"The IRS is just another bloated, money wasting government institution."

Taxation is theft, right Comrade?

Re: I can see it now...

This could take "government transparency" to a whole new level. Add in some off-shore data centers for data resiliency and availability and think of all the additional "oversight" other countries could have over IRS email traffic.

I mean, what's the big deal, the US government doesn't see anything wrong with snooping emails of foreign nationals, I'm sure they wouldn't object to having other countries take a peek at tax related messages.

Re: $12 million?

Would you have the same attitude if it was stolen from the business? Cos that's effectively what they did to the tax payer. Send me some of your hard earned would you? It's a short month and it seems it wouldn't make a difference to you anyway.

Re: Microsoft 'good citizens', from a tax payment viewpoint

I heard some while ago that Microsoft set aside a hefty slice of their revenue to offset against future product support costs. Now for server products and for retail products, yes I can understand that.

But what about OEM products where there are zero support costs? Is the reason for the lower cost of these items (apart from a reduction in packaging cost, and the fact that licenses are not transferable) that the difference between the selling price and cost price of OEM items not contributing to that support contingency fund?

(Responsibility for support for OEM products falls upon the Manufacturer of the Original Equiupment where the product is tied to).

Re: Good Citizens?

Nope. MS got in trouble in Oregon for shifting its taxes to Nevada I think it was. And then asking Oregon to install an exit from a freeway that went directly to the Microsoft campus...

We don't hear about it because Microsoft has its hands in nearly every thing.

Re: Good Citizens?

> Is that because they are 'good citizens', from a tax payment viewpoint?

Of course they ain't, if the IRS is after them for billions, they must be doing something wrong, right ?

Re: Not just government

So did we. We don't use the cloud version (Google Enterprise customer) but it was the cheapest way to licence the desktop installs of Word and Excel.

Re: Not just government

"Our group IT moved us onto Office 365 a while ago, but I'd be willing to bet >95% of employees aren't even aware it exists."

We bought Office365 licenses too, but only because it is cheaper than on-premise-only but includes the on-premise Office licenses as well and is licensed per user (instead of per install, which is tricky to track). We never used or activated the online part.

Are they sure the government didn't do the same?

Re: oh come now

Guilty as charged! Also, it occurs that if the subscriptions had been used, it might cost significantly more to extricate themselves from the cloud once it finally gets through that a government tax operation has NO BUSINESS putting their user's private data on a foreign company's servers.

Re: Not surprising

The politicians waste/steal/misappropriate far more than the bureaucrats.

"The purchase was made without first determining project infrastructure needs, integration requirements, business requirements, security and portal bandwidth, and whether the subscriptions were technologically feasible on the IRS enterprise,"

Sounds familiar.

Back in the early 2000s, my current employer spent (apparently) a small fortune on a Lotus Notes system with the idea that it would help us integrate various systems, and manage the staff calendars more effectively than they could.

A couple of years later, we introduced Exchange to do the same, so I asked our Lotus Notes admin what happened to the state of the art server we'd bought to run the Lotus Notes server components. He said, "Oh, that. It's under my desk keeping my feet warm". I will say, even in the dead of winter, it did a good job of keeping the office warm with no other heating sources.