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Obama CIO on leave after cuffing of former employee

White House caution

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America's first federal chief information officer has been placed on leave after one of his former employees was arrested for alleged IT bribery.

The White House tells The Washington Post that federal CIO Vivek Kundra is currently on leave due to "an abundance of caution." President Obama tapped Kundra for the brand new post on March 5.

Prior to joining the feds, the 34-year-old served a chief technology officer for the local Washington, D.C. government, overseeing IT for 86 local agencies spanning 38,000 employees. And on Thursday, a manager in the D.C. CTO office was arrested on charges of bribery, conspiracy, money laundering, and conflict of interest. Forty-year-old Yusuf Acar is suspected of soliciting and accepting bribes in exchange for IT contracts.

Also arrested was Sushil Bansal, president and CEO of IT consultant Advanced Integrated Technologies. The 41-year-old is charged with bribery and money laundering.

Federal authorities say that Kundra is not being investigated in connection with the alleged bribery scam. He is "on leave until further details [about the arrests] become known."

As federal CIO, Kundra has been directed to "work to ensure that [the US is] using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations." Presumably, this will involve Google. Evidence of Kundra's Google love can be seen here. ®

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Latest Comments

not good to work in IT in DC

When you work there people twist your words and upper IT management work by using canned responses and never truly under any situation and love to be bent by offferings and such.

Blackmail is the way to go in IT in DC.

I have 2 pages of names of those who I would love to have fired in DC to make IT a better place.

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Anonymous Coward

err

Anyone blaming Obama or Kundra needs to explain how you can take part in Illinois politics or work for the District of Columbia government, and not know somebody who is headed for trouble. A bunch of people just were convicted in a tax office scandal in DC.

Kundra did not hire Acar. One might question whether he should have caught the guy, but was not an inspector general, and was not hired to be one. And were it possible to eliminate all corruption in the DC IT world, that would be far from fixing all its problems.

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@Cuffing = Hand-cuffing not hitting

"spent the whole article looking for the point he hit his employees...."

omg... that would be the greatest administration ever! I think I would actually pay to watch that!

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