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Damien Patton, Banjo founder and CEO, poses for a portrait at the company’s office in South Jordan on Monday, March 9, 2020. A state audit found the surveillance company was never capable of performing the services it had promised under a $21 million contract.
Ivy Ceballo, Deseret News
A posthumous state audit of high-tech surveillance startup Banjo which briefly held a contract worth tens of millions of dollars with Utah law enforcement agencies found the Park City company was never capable of delivering on promised services and had inappropriate access to databases with sensitive information.
State Auditor John Dougall also raised questions about the state procurement vetting process in a report issued last week, including whether criminal background checks should be conducted on the people who run businesses that earn lucrative public contracts.
Robert Gehrke: How Utah became a digital privacy leader, while making a few mistakes along the way
An audit of the state’s contract with Banjo helps refine the government’s relationship with Big Data.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Robert Gehrke.
| April 4, 2021, 12:00 p.m.
Last week, we got a long-awaited audit into the state’s controversial and ultimately aborted contract with Banjo, a company that touted its ability to gobble up vast amounts of public and state-held data on all of us and use it to fight crime.
Auditors found the Big Brother tech didn’t follow industry best practices and shouldn’t have been allowed access to our personal information. That’s the bad news.
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In this screenshot taken from the Utah County Government’s YouTube channel, Utah County Clerk/Auditor Amelia Powers Gardner, inset, urges Utah County commissioners Bill Lee and Tom Sakievich not to vote to move budget oversight out of her office, blasting them for proposing such a “major” structural change with barely 24 hours notice. The commissioners voted soon after to approve the change in the public meeting on Wednesday, March 31, 2021.
YouTube
High-ranking state officials as well as local leaders from Utah County are seething at a Wednesday vote by county commissioners to sweep budget oversight away from the county’s independently elected clerk/auditor and place it solely under the commission.