Capgemini, the esteemed French technology conglomerate, has decided to abruptly sell its US subsidiary after realizing its staff had moonlighted as bounty hunters for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It appears the company discovered that “skip tracing” is slightly more controversial than debugging Java code.
The immediate result is a frantic game of corporate hot potato, as the company scrambles to offload the embarrassing American branch before their reputation turns into a guillotine target. French politicians are currently wiping sweat from their brows, relieved that their national champion will no longer be the IT support for deportation raids.
Capgemini Government Solutions had signed a lovely $4.8 million contract to provide “skip tracing services,” which sounds like a playful children’s game but actually involves finding people who really do not want to be found. The work was intended to support “enforcement and removal operations,” a task that generally clashes with the corporate image of digital transformation and cloud computing.
The backlash intensified significantly following fatal shootings involving Border Patrol and ICE agents in Minneapolis, which cast a harsh spotlight on the agency’s methods. Capgemini executives likely calculated that facilitating a manhunt is slightly less lucrative than their usual gig of overcharging for spreadsheet management.
In a stunning display of modern management, CEO Aiman Ezzat admitted he only learned about the nature of the contract by reading about it on the internet, just like the rest of us. One has to admire a leadership style that relies on LinkedIn notifications to find out what the company is actually doing on weekends.
French lawmakers were not amused, with Finance Minister Roland Lescure demanding the transparency that apparently vanished the moment the contract was signed. Opposition MP Hadrien Clouet called for sanctions, arguing that French companies should stick to what they do best: complaining about bureaucracy, not enforcing it.
The company admitted they failed to exercise “appropriate control” over the US subsidiary, which is corporate speak for “we looked away for five minutes and they started a police state.” Consequently, the divestiture process has begun immediately to ensure the French parent company can go back to being strictly boring.
Capgemini holds 13 contracts with ICE, but apparently, this was the one that finally broke the camel’s back and the bank’s risk management strategy. Now, the $22 billion giant is cutting ties, proving that even in the world of big tech, sometimes the only way to fix a glitch is to delete the entire hard drive.
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