Why Washington Pays Extra for Shoddy Work

摘要

After the Obamacare website's disastrous debut, Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, demanded to know whether the Obama administration would exact a price from the contractors whose buggy software prevented millions of Americans from buying healthcare policies on the federal exchange for months. "There isn't a built-in penalty, but I can tell you that paying for work that isn't complete is not something that we will do," Kathleen Sebelius, who oversaw the rollout as secretary of Health and Human Services, told Eshoo and other members of Congress at an October 2013 hearing. That turned out not to be true. According to an audit released on Sept. 22, CGI Federal, the main contractor for the website, was paid almost all the $56 million it billed taxpayers between the failed launch of the healthcare.gov website on Oct. l, 2013, and the following February. That included about $4 million for fixing defective CGI software that powered the insurance marketplace and connected it to other data systems needed to verify users' identities and eligibility for subsidies. The sum the government withheld for CGI's failures was $267,420-less than one day's worth of work.