CGI: Why Did Failure-Plagued Company Get The Obamacare Contract? Perhaps Connection To The NSA And PRISM Explains It…

(WEASEL ZIPPERS) – A great deal of media focus has been devoted to the epic failure of Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website.

Less has been said about the company who was engaged by HHS with responsibility for the design of the website and the roll out.

The company was CGI, a Canadian company. CGI has a long and checked past of failures and overruns on projects from Canada to Hawaii. Brian Lilley of Canada’s Sun News reported on some of the history in the below video.

According to Breitbart:

CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government, Breitbart News has learned.

CGI’s contract was canceled in 2007 after a report by the Auditor General found that the Canadian Firearms Information System (CFIS) being built by CGI was “significantly over budget” and that it had been plagued by delays.

The Conservative government that took power in 2006 canceled CGI’s gun registry contract, and eventually repealed the Canadian gun registry entirely.
In another parallel to the Obamacare controversy in the United States, the gun registry had been passed in 1993 over vehement Conservative objections, and was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000, before finally being repealed in most of the country in 2012.

The failed gun registry was only one of CGI’s many Canadian failures, which included canceled contracts to build health care databases in the provinces of Ontario and New Brunswick. Despite CGI’s checkered record, the Obama administration awarded its U.S. subsidiary, CGI Federal, the $93.7 million contract to build healthcare.gov, part of $678 million in health care services contracts awarded to the company.

A cursory review would have revealed the issues with CGI. But such a review was apparently never done or did not stop the selection.

How did HHS come to chose CGI?

The contract did not go out for competitive bidding as might normally be done. Instead, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid HHS employed a loophole that allowed them to select CGI. Read more via Weasel Zippers…