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Government IT projects have a tendency to fall on their rear ends more often than not. After the miserable debacle that was Healthcare.gov last October, I made the case for why the larger than life public face of Obamacare had zero chance of succeeding in original form. Fast forward six months, and after some contractor firings and a public about face consisting of a "tech surge", the website is finally working at nominal levels. That's not to say no one didn't take the fall for the mess of this bungled IT project gone haywire. The former head honcho of the...

He is an odd list of connections: CGI, the designer of the Obamacare website and computer system, is the parent company of Stanley, Inc., whose employees (2) along with an employee of Analyst Corp, were investigated for the State Department passport breaches involving said passports of Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barrack Obama. The Analyst Corp employee, one Leiutenant (his name, not rank) Quarles Harris, was reprimanded but not fired. Analyst Corp is a small company of approximately 100 employees at that time. It's CEO was at that time John Brennan, now Director of the CIA. As an side note,...

Massachusetts is dumping the contractor that created the state’s dysfunctional online health insurance marketplace and may hire a new company to fix the Health Connector website, a top state official said Monday. “We have made the decision we’re going to be parting ways with CGI,” said Sarah Iselin, who was hired recently by Governor Deval Patrick to oversee repairs to the website, which hasn’t worked properly since it was launched last October. The state has scrambled since then to sign up thousands of residents for health insurance that meets the requirements of the federal Affordable Care Act., resorting to using...

Has HHS gone from the CGI Federal frying pan into the Accenture fire? A month ago, the HHS unit responsible for Healthcare.gov dumped its original prime contractor and awarded the project to Accenture in a no-bid assignment, a move that raised eyebrows especially considering how little time was left in the enrollment cycle to get the web portal problems resolved. Now, a new Washington Post report raises even more eyebrows about the decision, given Accenture’s troubled history with federal contracts: Accenture, the contractor urgently tapped to help fix the federal health-insurance Web site, is a favorite of corporate America but...

Debacle: U.S. intelligence agencies report that developers linked to the Belarus government helped create the Healthcare.gov website and may have inserted malicious code making it vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking. The disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov was bad enough. But as if Americans need another reason to avoid Healthcare.gov, we now hear that the Obama administration, through the Department of Health and Human Services, has indirectly contracted with developers in the worker's paradise of Belarus, a former Soviet republic still closely tied to Russia, to write some of the software code used for the website. The Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz...

What is it about the primary cultprit behind the failure of healthcare.gov that allows them to continue to win federal contracts despite the most spectacularly incompetent website design and implementation in history? The Daily Caller is reporting that CGI, the general contractor used by CMS to build the Obamacare website, has received six additional contracts from CMS after the failures were discovered. The company that built the failed Obamacare website received six additional contracts from the Obama administration's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after the website's disastrous launch, The Daily Caller has learned.According to a company spokesman, CGI...

While the administration publicly expresses full confidence in its health care law, privately it fears one part of the system is so flawed it could bankrupt insurance companies and cripple ObamaCare itself. "Week after week, month after month," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, "the Obama administration kept telling us everything's working fine, there's no problem and then they turn on a dime and fire their contractor." To justify a no-bid contract with Accenture after firing CGI as the lead contractor, the administration released documents from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Center...

State officials have agreed to pull the plug after spending $85 million on a tax computer system project that was supposed to handle the processing of tax forms and other tax information for years ahead. A contract between the state and the CGI Group was canceled Friday. The state and CGI “mutually agreed” to a final $5 million payment for unbilled work not yet paid and that will close out the contract, according to Trevor Johnson, a Revenue Department spokesman. CGI had previously received $63.8 million for its work on the tax software project, which had been handling some aspects...

The Obama administration has offshore outsourced Obamacare. They made Accenture the lead contractor for the website healthcare.gov. The contract is estimated to be worth $90 million and the original contractor, CGI Federal, is out. We pointed out earlier that the failed Obamacare website was poetic justice as CGI Federal is also an offshore outsourcer of U.S. jobs. But now the poster boy for labor arbitrage, offshore tax havens, and bloated, often failed government contracts is in charge, Accenture. Accenture is one of the biggest offshore outsourcers of American jobs. In 2012 they used 4,037 H-1B Visas alone and are ranked...

Washington (CNN) -- Just days after dismissing two top advisers for their roles in the George Washington Bridge scandal, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is facing questions over the use of Superstorm Sandy relief funds. CNN has learned that federal officials are investigating whether Christie improperly used those relief funds to produce tourism ads that starred him and his family. The news couldn't come at a worse time for the scandal-plagued Republican, who is facing two probes into whether his staff tied up traffic near the country's busiest bridge to punish a Democratic mayor who refused to endorse his successful...

The Obama administration is reportedly dumping the IT contractor responsible for building the glitch-riddled healthcare.gov website. Officials familiar with the situation say CGI Federal’s inability to resolve the many problems that plague the online federal health care exchanges prompted federal officials to look elsewhere for IT help. Obama administration officials are preparing to sign a 12-month contract valued at $90 million with a different contractor, Accenture, after CGI Federal’s contract expires in February, the Washington Post reported, citing “a person familiar with the matter.”

The Obama administration has decided to jettison CGI Federal, the main IT contractor that was responsible for building the defect-ridden online health insurance marketplace and has been immersed in the work of repairing it. Federal health officials are preparing to sign a 12-month contract worth roughly $90 million, probably early next week, with a different company, Accenture, after concluding that CGI has not been effective enough in fixing the intricate computer system underpinning the federal Web site, HealthCare.gov. Accenture, which is one of the world’s largest consulting firms, has extensive experience with computer systems on the state level, and it...

The ongoing struggles of healthcare.gov are creating an understandable sense of anxiety and unease among Democrats in Washington. The site is a key element of the party’s central recent policy initiative. Abject failure will be devastating to the reputation of Democrats nationwide, including huge swaths of people who had no crucial role in the design of the Affordable Care Act and certainly nothing to do with the information technology architecture of the federal insurance exchange. One place where people aren’t panicking is in the actual belly of the beast—the offices of CGI Federal, the U.S. division of the global IT...

Per the Obamacare Web Disaster: Many of you know I develop websites just like this for a living. It's what I do.I am here to tell you, given three years that they were given, if I had the following team: One artistic Design person, One skilled DBA, one skilled Security guy, one Web/Data integration specialist, three skilled developers (2 on .NET and one on jQuery), one Business Analyst who knew the legislation, and one Policies and Procedures person (for the ATO and C&A certifications and documentation) and me as Architect, I could have had this thing deployable and humming along...

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) contracted with CGI Federal Inc. to build the government’s health insurance exchange, Federal Exchange (FX). The deal has an estimated total value of $93.7 million over a two-year base with three, one-year option periods. The $55.7 million base contract has been awarded. [Commentary: Fire, aim, ready! Will states make the right invesemtnt in HIX IT?] Under the contract, CGI will work with CCIIO to develop and implement the Federal Exchange in line with the provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires the creation...

<p>Health Fail: Healthcare.gov's implosion may be due to one of its major developers being selected less for its technical competence than for cronyism. Perhaps the White House was hoping for a friends and family discount.</p> <p>Why pick a Canadian firm with a French name to help develop the official ObamaCare website? It certainly wasn't based on the track record in developing health care software of CGI Federal, the IT contractor that orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov website.</p>

For the record: Valerie’ Jarrett’s daughter Laura’s father-in-law Canadian Liberal politician Bas Balkissoon is not (thank God!) Canada’s Prime Minister. Nor, as some news outlets are indicating, is he a MP. (Member of Parliament). Balkissoon—one of many Canadian Liberals with deep ties to the Obama administration—is a minor player MPP (Member of Provincial Parliament ) at Ontario’s Queen’s Park, irreverently known to the plebes as the ‘Pink Palace’. Before landing at the Pink Palace as a ready-made Liberal MPP, Balkissoon was a City of Toronto councillor involved in a computer leasing scandal. Wow, what a coincidence! Just as key Barack...

A year after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc across the eastern United States, only a fraction of the aid money earmarked for recovery has been used, in what some claim is a painfully slow and opaque process. Only $5.2 billion of the pledged $47.9 billion had been tapped by cities and states by the end of August, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And tracking those funds has been complicated, lawmakers said. "Transparency is woefully lacking. We don't know where the money is. We know people have been approved for grants, but the money has not been...

CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy. In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.

In mid-October The Washington Examiner reported that Federal Officials only considered one firm to build the epic fail now known as healthcare.gov. When that story broke you had to suspect that someone probably had a kickback coming. Richard Pollock reported on October 13th: Federal officials considered only one firm to design the Obamacare health insurance exchange website that has performed abysmally since its Oct. 1 debut. Rather than open the contracting process to a competitive public solicitation with multiple bidders, officials in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid accepted a sole bidder, CGI...