JCI Paragon

A couple years ago when I first looked at JCI’s operations I found or was sent links to stories about naughty things their employees had done. One was a systematic bid rigging scheme in pre Katrina New Orleans and the other was a suit by Chrysler for JCI’s selling them sub par batteries. Here’s another JCI story , also out of Louisianna, that I was just sent. Its not that big a deal. A new school district allowed venders to have contracts without a proper bidding process. Here’s a bit about JCI’s role in the story:

Add in two more contracts, one with Johnson Controls for air conditioning maintenance at $393,000 over three years and Tyler Technologies for approximately $200,000. Add all of the money up, and it totals $1,016,929 of your taxpayer money.

The report says Central “had difficulty finding and providing copies of records we requested to conduct our audit.” Specifically, it says when the district was asked about the Johnson Controls’ contract, it gave three different stories.

I mention this because I’m still shaking my head over Ralph Doty’s old contention that because he dealt with honorable JCI staff in Ohio it was preposterous to conclude that JCI might have anything other than honorable people in their employ.

I suspect that there might be a mountain of similar unflattering JCI stories out there. I also know that there is a big Internet business in cleaning up google searches whereby major companies hire others to sandbag negative stories on the Internet so that they will show up waaaaay at the bottom of Internet searches.

Check that. I just did a google search for “Johnson Controls scandals” and there was a pretty impressive list that popped up. JCI’s role in Duluth’s Red Plan which has perhaps a thousand nasty posts from this web page alone didn’t even pop up in the first page. I guess when you have enough bad apples it gets harder to sweep all that putrescence under the carpet.

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