Via an Trinidad Guardian newspaper article on Friday January 16 2015 , Minister of Science and Technology (of Trinidad and Tobago), Dr. the Honourable Rupert Griffith has said that the Trinidad and Tobago Government owes 3 million US dollars in outstanding license fees to software and service providers like Microsoft.
The amount owed to Microsoft and other software providers (which weren’t named in the article) was as high as 23 million US dollars but this was reduced to 3 million US dollars after the Trinidad and Tobago Government negotiated with the software providers.
The non-compliance use of software by the Trinidad and Tobago Government was discovered by Microsoft, who brought it to the Ministry of Science and Technology’s attention for the Government to be more compliant. According to Dr. Rupert Griffith in the article:
“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.”
….
“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,”
Read the Trinidad Guardian article “Govt owes US$3m for licenses”
