When the Obama administration bypassed the usual competitive bidding rules to issue an emergency $91 million, no-bid contract to Accenture to buld the missing back-end payment system for Healthcare.gov, the justification was that the entire system would collapse without this functionality complete by mid-March.
But was the payment system completed? Of course not. In fact, HHS has now published a timeline for payments using the manual, estimated “Interim Payment Process” through at least the end of September — more than six months behind the deadline that so urgently required a no-bid contract:
And here’s the really wonderful news on Accenture’s no-bid contract: not only is it running at least six months late, but the cost has also ballooned to at least $121 million, a 33 percent cost overrun of $30 million. And it will almost certainly continue to climb.
Accenture: mediocre performance, late and over budget.
But hey, what’s another $121 million dollars from federal taxpayers when you just flushed over a billion on just five state Obamacare websites that barely work at all?