Minister of Education and Science Dace Melbarde examined IT procurement in her department and was taken aback. It turns out the ministry purchased cables for computer mice at unprecedented prices: 84 euros each, reports "Grani."
Today, most people prefer wireless computer mice: they are convenient and require no cables. They cost around 10-20 euros.
However, the Ministry of Education and Science decided to stick to the old ways and purchased cables for wired computer mice. Why is that? Probably because, like in a joke from the nineties (where a new Russian bought a tie for two thousand bucks, and a friend called him a fool since it could be bought around the corner for three thousand), the Ministry managed to find a batch of cables costing 84 euros each. This is a real shock — such prices for a trivial cable should not exist. Moreover, these cables should disappear from sales — they are an anachronism. But in the Ministry, it seems, the people responsible for purchases are unaware of this.
A dismayed Dace Melbarde wrote on social media X: "The IT Department in the Ministry of Education and Science is an area where I have faced serious challenges. At my request, internal audits of IT purchases were initiated in the ministry at the end of last year and the beginning of this year."
Lawyer and politician Andris Teikmanis also commented on this story on X: "I was particularly struck by the price of the mouse cables — each cable cost the Ministry of Education and Science 84 euros, but if you multiply by the number of computers, it turns out that the ministry paid 640 thousand euros just for mouse cables, excluding VAT. I hope the ministry has some justification for such a choice, especially considering that the Ministry of Education and Science decided not to fulfill the Saeima's task of transforming the Higher Education Council into an expert institution, but to liquidate it in the name of budget savings (the annual budget of the Higher Education Council is 130 thousand euros — much less than the Ministry of Education and Science was willing to pay for mouse cables)."
Now the public has one question: if a trivial mouse cable costs 84 euros, how much does the mouse itself cost for the Ministry?
