Stories about: Australian Customs Service

Australian employees of outsourcer EDS have firmly rejected the company's latest remuneration offer, with staff voting down a deal that would have frozen wage levels but improved some entitlements.

Demand for outsourcing services continues to rise, but so do the problems. It all begins when outsourcing providers send in the A Team to ink the deal, and when the transition is complete customers are often left with the F Troop.

With Federal government hitching its border security to the biometrics bandwagon, two knowledgeable ex-feds give their frank and differing views on where the taxpayer-funded romance with the technology is heading. Julian Bajkowski reports.

In just 18 months, Australian Customs Service CIO Murray Harrison appears to have finally brought to heel the beast that is his department's unruly Integrated Cargo System (ICS), with business groups and major developers determined to force through a July 1 2005 deadline despite protestations from freight forwarders and some shippers.

IT infrastructure services giant EDS has drawn a line in the sand over the way it intends to drum up new infrastructure business, with selective sourcing, open source and IBM definitely not part of the equation.

For the second time this month, embattled IT services giant EDS is fighting for its public sector life as government agencies activate sunset clauses on the last of its big-bang outsourcing deals.

In an announcement that has been foreshadowed for months, the Australian Customs Service today confirmed it has extended its outsourcing agreement with EDS by more than two years.

The dreaded spectre of cargo rotting on docks and at airports is again haunting airlines, stevedores and shipping lines, which face a desperate battle to make their IT systems interoperate with the export phase of the Australian Customs Service's now infamous, $146 million, Integrated Cargo System (ICS).

A company offering to reverse-search Telstra's telephone directories has gone into liquidation following a Federal Court decision upholding Telstra's ownership of intellectual property rights over its telephone book listings.

Faced with a ballooning bill for aerial maritime surveillance, the Australian Customs Service has followed in the footsteps of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation and is field-testing network centric Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to keep an eye in the sky for unauthorised arrivals.

The Australian Customs Service has chalked up its first custodial sentence for offences under the Copyright Act, with a Brisbane man given a nine month jail sentence of which he will serve three months, pay a $1500 recognisance fee and be placed upon a five year good behaviour bond.