Nadaleen Singh

Gov­ern­ment min­istries owe about US$3 mil­lion in out­stand­ing li­cense fees for us­ing ser­vices from providers such as Mi­crosoft.

This was con­firmed by Dr Ru­pert Grif­fith, Min­istry of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Sports who said the providers called on Gov­ern­ment to be more com­pli­ant.

Grif­fith said the amount owed orig­i­nal­ly was $23 mil­lion but was re­duced af­ter ne­go­ti­a­tions with the ser­vice providers.

"It is not a ques­tion of penal­ties, it is a ques­tion of com­pli­ance," he ex­plained.

"Over the last nine months the non-com­pli­ance was looked at. We en­tered in­to a ne­go­ti­a­tion with all of the providers, when we saw the $23 mil­lion. We ne­go­ti­at­ed the price and they were very kind to bring it down to about US$3 mil­lion.

"It is not a ques­tion of penal­ties."

Grif­fith said Mi­crosoft stum­bled up­on the non-com­pli­ance dur­ing a sur­vey and brought it to the at­ten­tion of the min­istry.

"We did our own sur­vey through iGovtt and the Min­istry of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy and we re­alised there was a lot of non-com­pli­ance in the use of some of the li­cens­es," he said.