The government decided 18 months ago to end a contract for its biggest jobs board with Monster and take the site in-house for a costly overhaul, only to be overwhelmed with complaints about system crashes, error messages and search-engine glitches. Many of the problems have been resolved with the help of new servers, help-desk staff and troubleshooting.
“If a private contractor was delivering this, the government would have terminated them for cause immediately,” Davidson, 46, of Fairfax County, said in an Oct. 27 Post story on the problems. He manages an online group of federal personnel contractors on the networking site Linked In.
His firing came within two days of a meeting between top Oracle representatives and officials with the personnel agency, Davidson said. OPM officials declined to confirm the meeting.
“I was terminated for cause for suggesting that OPM should be terminated for cause,” Davidson said. He was recruited to Oracle from another IT company last fall to manage federal sales of payroll, recruitment, performance management and other personnel systems.
“No one disputes the statement’s accuracy,” he said.
Personnel chief John Berry, when asked about Davidson’s firing, immediately sought an investigation into whether anyone on his staff expressed displeasure to Oracle and pressed for punitive action against Davidson.
Berry said he was not aware of the firing until a Post reporter asked him about the incident.
“It would be a violation of law, threatening a government contractor,” Berry said in an interview. “It’s not something I would condone or support. People’s careers are at stake.”
He referred the case to the personnel agency’s inspector general, Patrick McFarland. A spokeswoman for McFarland, Susan Ruge, confirmed that the office opened an investigation in December.
Oracle’s senior director of communications, Deborah Hellinger, declined to comment. Five Oracle executives with knowledge of Davidson’s case did not return phone calls.
Oracle, one of the country’s leading database makers with Washington-area offices in Reston, has a large footprint in the federal government, from payroll to performance-management systems. But it is reinvigorating its back-office functions as IT systems move to the cloud, industry leaders said. Davidson’s dismissal comes as the California-based company is bidding on a $3 million financial management software program for OPM.
The case underscores the delicate relationship between government contractors and the agencies for which they work.
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