FBI raids HQ of US govt IT giant Carahsoft

Virginia-based public sector IT services giant Carahsoft was raided Tuesday by US government agents.

“We can confirm that the FBI conducted court-authorized law enforcement activity on Sunset Hills Road this morning,” a bureau spokesperson told The Register. “We decline to comment further.”

John Weiler, head of the nonprofit Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council (IT-AAC), told The Register the FBI and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) had agents on-site at the business’s Sunset Hills Road headquarters in Reston, Virginia.

Carahsoft, meanwhile, said it is “fully cooperating” with the Feds, adding agents are apparently probing a business Carahsoft has worked with previously.

A spokesperson for the biz, which bills itself using the trademarked term “the Trusted Public Sector IT Solutions Provider,” told us: “Representatives from the Department of Justice came to the Carahsoft office today as they are conducting an investigation into a company with which Carahsoft has done business in the past. Carahsoft is fully cooperating on this matter. We are operating business as usual.”

Carahsoft supplies the American public sector with various technology services, from software to cybersecurity, and as such is a reseller for hundreds of top tech vendors, including AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. It booked about $13 billion in revenue in 2022.

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Weiler noted this is not the first time Carahsoft has faced government scrutiny. In 2015, VMware and Carahsoft agreed to pay $75.5 million to settle allegations that “they violated the False Claims Act by misrepresenting their commercial pricing practices and overcharging the government on VMware software products and related services.”

Carahsoft in 2022 was served with a Civil Investigative Demand (CID 22-498) pursuant to a False Claims Act Investigation into “whether its affiliates, and various resellers, including Carahsoft Technology Corp, conspired to make, made, or caused to be made false claims to the Department of Defense by coordinating the bids, prices, and/or market for software, cloud storage, and related hardware and services.”

That inquiry (1:23-cv-01999-RDB) is ongoing in US District Court in Baltimore, Maryland. The US Justice Department has not been satisfied with the documents Carahsoft has produced in response to its CID. Carahsoft has been fighting to have documents in the case sealed, as the corporation argued [PDF] earlier this month, while the Feds have opposed such measures. ®