IBM Corp has been officially cleared of foul play in supplying the US Navy with automatic data processing equipment – a US Congress report issued in December, following a year-long enquiry by the House Government Operations Committee, found the Navy to be the guilty party. In late 1988, six IBM plug-compatible vendors complained that the Navy had been showing consistent IBM bias in its acquisition of automatic data processing kit (CI No 1,076) but the Navy’s inspector general cleared IBM of these charges last autumn and the Congressional report concludes that, while a number of the Navy’s purchases had been biased towards IBM kit, this was probably because IBM seems to have equipped itself better than its competitors to compete under the ‘murky’ rules of the Navy’s methods of acquiring automatic data processing kit.
