Corporate transparency issues

Global Financial Integrity Honors Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) with 2011 Annual Award for Exemplary Leadership

Senator to Accept Award Tonight at Gala Dinner in Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, DC – Global Financial Integrity (GFI) will tonight present Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) with the organization’s 2011 annual Award for Exemplary Leadership in acknowledgement of his untiring efforts on behalf of financial integrity in the U.S. and abroad. Sen. Levin will accept the award this evening at a gala dinner hosted by GFI in his honor at The Army and Navy Club in Washington, DC.

“We are thrilled to honor Sen. Levin’s many distinguished contributions in pursuit of transparency and accountability in our financial system,” said GFI Director Raymond Baker. “For many years, Senator Levin has been at the forefront of both foreign and domestic anticorruption and tax justice efforts.”

“As chairman and ranking member of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Sen. Levin has played a pivotal role in exposing many of the biggest financial fraud schemes of the past decade. He led efforts to investigate offshore abuse in the collapse of Enron, exposed rampant money-laundering facilitation on behalf of foreign dictators at Riggs National Bank, and more recently, held hearings revealing how both UBS and LGT Bank helped thousands of wealthy Americans evade paying taxes to the IRS,” added Mr. Baker.

In the current Congress, GFI notes that Senator Levin has sponsored three pieces of legislation which would promote financial integrity. They are:

1. The Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act (S. 1346);
2. The Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act (S. 1483); and
3. The Equal Access to Tax Planning Act (S. 139).

Senator Levin is the third person to receive this honor from GFI. The award was first given in December 2009 to then-retiring New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau. Eva Joly, chairperson of the European Parliament’s Development Committee, received the 2010 award.

Oracle Global Reponsability - Let's build a real momentum

Oracle Earth week Celebration, with many volunteers in action for a better world is also an opportunity to request more from the company best assets - to make a better world.

Why not offering the best software to save life or prevent people from beeing harmed ?
Why not offering the best engineered software to the most demanding non profitable organisations

Health care institutions, Genetic diseases foundations deserves more empowerment from Oracle than just encouraging employees to take on their personal time to take telethon phone calls once a year.

We feel that the public sector and the non profit organisation could benefit the scalability, parallelisation capabilities, analytical datamining features of Oracle Software - For the best of mankind, and the honor of the company.

Let's remind that Oracle had a non GAAP Operating Margin of 44%, reaching 3.9 Billion dollars for a single last quarter.

Today, The French Senate did vote the Tobin Tax for France !

There is no more time to wait - Let's move !

EWC Training Event - Building a shared future

The whole group of EWC members will have the opportunity to join together for a 2 days training, a huge opportunity to figure out a sensible mission for the 27 EU country reps !

We strongly feel we can bring value to management by early sharing of impacting projects and employee concerns. In return we expect our proposals to be honestly considered by management in due time to make sense.

We think economic performance can be better achieved in the long term through a fair sharing of decision stakes, employee social cohesion and involvement.

This training will be a very first opportunity to exchange our respective views and hopefully build a respectful common ground.

Franck P. - FR WC Representative.

Equal Treatment - Amex for the US only

The current IT status page reminds us that for many years, EMEA is not allowing its employees to join the automatic Amex Claim process. We have never been able to get a sensible answer to this unequal treatment. The project is said to be engaged in Europe since 2005.
And expense processing does take a lot of time when at the same time the systems are ready...
Why wouldn't European employees benefit admin work reduction ?

IT Message Reference : "Certain credit card transactions may not be available due to a technical issue and the ADIT team is working to provide a root cause fix. As a workaround, in case your credit card charges are nearing payment due date, please pay them personally to Amex and claim them as Cash transaction(s). Once the existing issue is resolved and you see the related credit card charge on your Internet Expenses, please use the ‘Delete from Queue – Employee to pay Amex’ option to remove that charge. "

Oracle's Africa dealings come under FBI scrutiny

We had the opportunity to report many times the company lack of transparency regarding Oracle tax haven operations, in capability to host many secret fund transfers towards swiss accounts.
CFDT Labor Union filled an official complaint regarding Oracle Ethics Code and the lack of compliance of Offshore operations.

The complaint was dismissed without further investigations.

The wall street journal is reporting an FBI investigation towards Oracle African deals, initiated few years ago, that could unveil many very unethics affairs, if the Tax havens operations secrecy could be blown out.

How many times shall we wait before state of art accounting, independant certification and operations transparency is enforced in subsidiaries like Cayman Islands ?

When are we really going to shut down these darn tax haven ?

You will find very few Electronic traces of tax haven operations, employees, web sites, contacts - We should not get exposed to our own Ethics code whisleblowing process ! Opacity is at its maximum, and no one knows who watches these subsidiaries !

Read More : Oracle Capac Registration
High tech Planet : Secrets of an IT Road Warrior - An imaginary novel figuring a millionaire - Luke Mc Ellis.
And even more iconoclastic : Larry's fake interview on youtube

France Bonus Story

Why are French employees are not elligible to bonuses ?
Some might spread the word because of rep unions.

The true story is somewhat different - You can blame a very poor management.

There has been no problems for years, as long as management used wisely of the "discretionnary" distribution, and no one had to dispute any unfair treatment.
However the tough years came and bonuses were heavily impacted. This would have been fine if discretionnary hadn't taken the new form of negative discremination in too many managers hands.
Women were clearly not fairly treated, entire top performing teams were forgotten, and friendship networking took over the performance recognition.
Bonuses were distributed to friends ( for example from you the same merger company, or yes-men), killing confidence of many in fair appraisals, and building strong resentment amongst employees.

Our responsability as a union was to ask for a sensible treatment for all performers. We wanted bonuses to have a written basis.

Instead, the management decision was to shut down bonuses, and finally close the door to performance recognition.

We have asked again in May the opening of negociations on this topic - to be followed.

1700 recruitments within Oracle Europe

Info From the financial Times.
Those recruitments, as seen on the jobs.oracle.com website will largely concerne field sales reps.
You may drill down per country, 900 Sales rep positions are available when selecting "none" in the country field (and including soudi arabia, kenya positions...)

US Senator Levin : "We gotta shut down these darn tax havens"

Yet an other view from the Anti Tax Haven Bill.

And always our requests for a better corporate responsability, for a better world..
How about the Oracle Financial Vehicules transparency ? ...

Amidst Heated Budget Debate Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act Targets $100 Billion in Lost Tax Revenue

From Global Financial Integrity, the following annoucement gives more ground for our request of country-by-country financial reporting. Let's put the haven Islands aside.

WASHINGTON, DC – Senator Carl Levin introduced the “Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act” today, taking aim at offshore tax haven abuses which cost approximately $100 billion in lost tax revenue per year. The bill contains an array of provisions which would permanently close offshore tax loopholes, raise revenue, and increase transparency and accountability for multinational businesses. The bill is cosponsored by Senators Bill Nelson, Sanders, Shaheen, and Whitehouse, and is supported by business leaders and public interest groups including Global Financial Integrity.

“Passage of the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act would be a game changer,” said Global Financial Integrity (GFI) director, Raymond Baker. “It would close offshore tax loopholes, remove incentives to send money and jobs overseas, level the playing field between small businesses and multinational corporations, and strengthen law enforcement and tax collection capacities.”

The bill also contains a provision (§201) to require annual country-by-country reporting by SEC-registered corporations related to their employees, sales, purchases, sales, financing arrangements, and taxes. This provision is similar to §1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 which requires all U.S. and foreign companies registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to publicly report how much they pay governments for access to their oil, gas and minerals.

“The country-by-country reporting provision adds a layer of pro-investment, best practices accountability to this bill,” said Mr. Baker. “For investors, the more information available about a company’s business practices and balance sheets, the better. This reporting requirement would also help anti-corruption and economic development efforts in developing countries by creating more transparency and accountability in the business dealings between multinational companies and governments.”

IBM - Call for an action day on June 14th

The impressive growth of profits is still impacting jobs in IBM and salaries are under deep pressure and management discretionary control. IBM France unions are calling for an action day on June 14th.
Will Oracle employees be joining the big fair of unhappy employees in top revenue record breaking companies ?
Read more

Oracle Global Reponsability - So far away from beeing credible

Lots of work needs to be done in order for Oracle to be credible in the Global Responsability Arena.

Bullets have been heavily received by the FTSE4Good Index as Oracle has been deleted from the series (The Green place article)

This follows the very last place in IT Ranking from Greenpeace.

We do hope these "awards" will give some credibility to our request for free licencing of Oracle software towards healthcare non profit organizations.

The France Consulting Bonus Story

Lots of consulting contacts take any opportunity to express their interest regarding the France Consulting bonus "illegal" aspects. As a matter of facts, France has been excluded from Consulting, ACS, Education, Support bonus pools.
There has never been in the past problems with bonus as long as compensation distribution rules are clearly communicated. This has clearly not been the case in many teams, where bonuses were unevenly distributed, and where good performers with high utilisation rates could get nothing !
We also had a clear issue with female salary recognition regarding bonus.

This "unfair" treatment is the main illegal point which could have been easily corrected by entering into a description of rules on how to get a bonus on an individual basis.
Management refused to enter such a regulation, willing to keep the capability to change the rules, and distribute whatever they wanted to whoever without explainations.

This clearly was unacceptable as excellence must be shown and explainable. We would not support non explainable recognition. We contest the fact that bonus is deployed to reward performance, at least through some terminal management channels in France.

Therefore HR entered into an agreement with the labor unions to partially integrate the bonus rights within the base salary. And we still request for shared success recognition through SMART explainable goals to each individuals;

We shall see if attrition rates attracts more attention on finding the way for a better way of managing motivation and keeping the wheel of success running - Even in France.

Merger Hard facts - The job mapping process

Oracle Merger procedures can be quite rude and especially conservative when considering the target job code of a former employee. Like Siebel or Peoplesoft employees in the past, Sun people can legitimely ask the question on the hard facts dictating their final Oracle Grading.

We should expect IC3, IC4 population dispersion curves to be about the same between former Sun Employees and Oracle ones. However, the French works council analysis, during the merger consultation procedures showed a discrepency around the Sun level 9 grading, initially planned towards IC3 level, but replanned to IC4 in France.

It seems that other countries conducted subsequent mass remapping on a team per team basis, based on the approval cases built by management. It is still time to ask for clarification and, if justified, mass corrective actions can be approved by management.

If you feel undermapped - It is not to late to ask for a fair treatment to your management or through your workers representatives.

Don't hesitate to post comments on the link below.

EWC Annual Meeting March 16th

The company will hold its European Works Council this week in Reading. We all expect to have a good understanding on employment perspectives and salary strategy, as more and more people especially in sales and consulting take the opportunity to leave following the economy recovery.

We can already figure out the employment numbers through those internal sheets.

(Upd March 24) The official Communiqué is under EMEA Management Review.

Oracle Support - Facing the hard facts

Revenue and margin cannot just go down with less people and less service provided to customers.

Can it ?

With the egyptian revolution messing up 2 thirds of some support European teams, times are really painful for our "Old Europe" collegues.

One of them submitted the the following Article from SearchOracle.Com.

Good reading

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