Outsourcing and responsibility

Hewlett-Packard is settling a claim with the government of Canada. But what I find interesting about this is their comments that their own employees aren't responsible, but instead that one of their subcontractors hatched a scheme to defraud both parties.

And this matters?

Businesses must be cognizant of their responsbility to provide a contracted service. Customers don't and can't monitor their arrangements on how to service that contract. There are whole businesses (general contractors) whose sole job is to manage these sorts of complexities.

To their credit, HP seems to accept this notion in that they settled the claim.

But even raising this as an excuse is laughable and worriesome. Is HP somehow less responsible because it failed to scrutinise its suppliers?

Is your medical insurer or financial company less responsible because the leak of your personal data happened in India rather than in their own office? Or is a software vendor less responsible for a back-door because it was inserted by a contract programming house in India or Russia or other grossly-stereotyped labour market?

I wonder how long it will take for some enterprising lawyer to argue for punitive damages in a confidential disclosure case in an amount comparable to the labour savings the defendent enjoyed in outsourcing the work in the first place.

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