Major Fine to Contractor Providing Data Services to U.S. Government

Network Appliance of California will pay a fine of $128 million to settle claims by the U.S. Governemnt that it overcharged them. The company was accused of not offering the same prices to its government customers as it did to commercial ones. PCWorld writes that this settlement was the result of charges brought due to a whistleblowing former employee. NetApps had qualified through the General Services Administration (GSA) to provide various data management and storage solutions. The GSA schedule allows companies to pre-qualify goods and services and their prices so that government agencies can contract directly with the company. In this case NetApps charged the government higher prices then it did other customers and did not provide correct pricing data…

Source: BNET