Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is taking Oracle to court. The state of Oregon 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.
Oregon has filed a long-expected lawsuit against Oracle over its role developing the state’s troubled health insurance exchange website, alleging the vendor fraudulently induced Oregon to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for software and services that didn’t work as promised. Oracle’s actions “amount to a pattern of racketeering,” according to the 126-page complaint filed Friday by Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum in a state circuit court. First, Oracle lied about its capabilities, saying its software could meet Oregon’s needs “out-of-the-box,” the complaint states. After a deal was struck, Oracle committed breach of contract by “overcharging for poorly trained Oracle personnel to provide incompetent work,” hiding its shortcomings from Oregon, and refusing to honor a warranty calling for it to fix errors at no charge, the complaint alleges. In a statement Friday, Oracle called the suit “a fictional account” and said it expects to prevail in its own lawsuit against Oregon, which was filed two weeks ago. Oracle has said state officials are running a “smear campaign” and are attempting to cover up their own failings.