Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Contracting and Oversight
Testimony of J.F. Zorg, Founder & CEO, SolutionCorp™

I knew that we had two contracts. I did not know, and was not in a position to know, the operational relationship between the parties to those contracts, which is a matter for the State Department, not for a systems integrator. I'd add that this question assumes a knowledge of geopolitics that a defense contractor is specifically prohibited from acting on. You can't have it both ways.

To the shareholders, to the twelve hundred employees of that division, and to the government that certified the export licenses on both sides. I wrote that sentence. I stand by it. What I object to is the implication that a certified, licensed, lawful transaction becomes retroactively sinister because someone in this room finds the outcome distasteful. That's not testimony. That's a feeling.

Nobody approved an expansion, because there was no expansion. There was a capability. A capability doesn't discriminate by profession. If you build a system that can find a bomb-maker, and it turns out the same system can find a shop steward, you haven't expanded the system. You've discovered what it already was. I didn't write that fact into existence. I'm being asked to apologise for arithmetic.

The savings were anticipated and delivered, and they are in the report your own subcommittee accepted without objection at the time. Nobody in this room asked a follow-up question in 2003. I'm now being asked to relitigate a transaction that this body already reviewed and closed. If the review was inadequate, that's an oversight failure. It is not mine.

I see how you'd like it to read. I see two independent determinations, made by two different divisions, on two different timelines, that happen to share a calendar. If every coincidence in this industry were treated as a conspiracy, no contract in this country would ever close. I'll also note, for the record, that the vendor in question has never filed a complaint. Not one. Ask yourself why the complaint is coming from this room and not from them.

What concerns me is that this committee has spent an afternoon describing a credit system and calling it a scandal. Every bank in this country scores people without a signature on every individual scoring event. We disclosed our methodology publicly, which is more than I can say for the institutions this body has never once subpoenaed. I built something legible. I'm being punished for the legibility. Frankly, I think that's the actual finding here, and I'd ask that it be entered into the record.