Seven months after federal officials fired CGI Federal for its botched work on Obamacare website Healthcare.gov, the IRS awarded the same company a $4.5 million IT contract for its new Obamacare tax program,
the Daily Caller reported.
After months of embarrassing failures with the Obamacare website, federal officials finally terminated CGI’s contract in January 2014.
But in August, just seven months later, IRS officials signed a new contract for CGI to provide "management support" and "critical functions" for its Obamacare tax program.
The IRS contract, which expires in August, is worth almost $4.5 million.
Before terminating CGI’s contract,
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the website a "debacle" and described herself as "frustrated and angry" over the rollout.
According to a joint report by Republican Senate Judiciary and Finance Committee staffers last year, a company hired by HHS to review CGI's performance with HealthCare.Gov found 21,000 lines of defective software code inserted by the firm.
And according to the Daily Caller, Washington has company when it comes to being fed up with CGI. Its Obamacare website in Massachusetts failed, and officials in Vermont "pulled the plug on CGI" and "imposed a $5 million penalty on the company for its shoddy work."
Millions of Obamacare recipients and Americans who will be assessed a tax penalty for failing to have had a federally approved health insurance plan in 2014 will depend on the IRS to correctly process their tax returns.
If the IRS botches the job, some taxpayers could find themselves getting smaller refunds than they are entitled to receive or paying more out-of-pocket for health insurance.
A September 2013 report by the IRS inspector-general "found problems with IRS software, including lax security and fraud controls," according to the Daily Caller.
Acting IRS Deputy Inspector General Michael E. McKenney found that many of the problems "can be traced to software flaws and misconfigurations of system components."
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