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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

House Homeland Security probes DHS ERP procurement

A troubled enterprise resource planning project at the Homeland Security Department is gaining further scrutiny by the House Homeland Security Committee.

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Rep. Christopher Carney (D-Pa.), chairman of the management, investigations and oversight subcommittee, sent a letter (.pdf) on July 16 to DHS Under Secretary for Management Rafael Borras, wanting to know if DHS has halted contractor source selection for its Transformation and Systems Consolidation program.

TASC is one of 20 projects selected by OMB for review under the auspices of a June 28 White House memo which calls for agencies not to initiate new development spending on federal financial management systems worth more than $20 million until
OMB has reviewed spending plans. Both the DHS inspector general and the Government Accountability Office have issued recent reports drawing attention to the program's difficulties. DHS issued a request for proposals for the "end-to-end business processes in support of financial, acquisition and asset management" project with the intention of making an award by the second quarter of fiscal 2010, which ended March 31.

Thompson and Carney, in their letter, said they support the "concept" of TASC, but "serious reservations regarding the projected $450 million cost of the TASC contract remains." The project "falls squarely within the purview of [the June 28 OMB] memorandum," they state, adding that they want to know what impact the memo will have on TASC's future, whether the department is now considering alternatives to TASC, and whether or not the planned OMB review of TASC has commenced.

For more:
  • download the Thompson and Carney letter (.pdf)
  • read the July 2009 DHS OIG report 10-95 on TASC (.pdf)
  • read December 2009 GAO report 10-76 on TASC (.pdf)
-David Perera, FierceGovernmentIT.com
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