Accenture Faces Mid-March Healthcare.gov Deadline Or 'Disaster'

PapayaSF writes "TheHill.com reports that Accenture has two months to fix HealthCare.gov by building a 'financial management platform that tracks eligibility and enrollment transactions, accounts for subsidy payments to insurance plans, "provides stable and predictable financial accounting and outlook for the entire program," and that integrates with existing CMS and IRS systems.' The procurement document, posted on a federal website, states that if this is not completed in time, there will be 'financial harm to the government' and 'the entire healthcare reform program is jeopardized.' Risk mitigation (which pays insurers who enroll a higher-than-expected number of sick patients) must be accurately forecast, or it might put 'the entire health insurance industry at risk.' Accenture will also have to fix the enrollment transmissions, which have been sending inaccurate and garbled data to insurance companies. Because the back-end cannot currently handle the federal subsidies, insurers will be paid estimated amounts as a stopgap measure. The document also said that officials realized in December that there was no time for a 'full and open competition process' before awarding Accenture the $91 million contract. What are their odds of success?"

Comments

Open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is government software like this thing not open source? What is the motivation for it being closed source?

Re:Open source

[Joce640k]

Money.

Re:Open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Two reasons:

1. People are (god help me, I feel a fedora sprouting from my head and hairs growing from my neck as I type this) sheep. Your average person would lose their goddamned shit if they didn't have someone telling them what to do and when to do it. This is the end result of an education system that teaches blind love of authority, followed by corporate structures that do the same with regard to their employees. Thinking is hard. Decisions are tough. Et cetera.

2. The only way to resolve the problem of the system is to vote in people who will change it. But if we vote for the wrong people, those other people might get elected! And they'll destroy us all! We'd better just vote for our team. Oh, yes.

Re:Who are Accenture?

[Dodgy G33za]

Accenture worked on the Australian Taxation Offices "Change Program", which cost billions and was a debacle. From the moment that they got the contract it was all about trying to progressively descope so that they had to deliver less and less. They delivered a fraction of what they said they would and many years late.

But then they have a habit of employing smart young non-techies and then putting them in technical positions, and work practices that border on a cult.

Why anyone would throw money at these clowns is anyone's guess.

Re:Who are Accenture?

[Tom]

Why anyone would throw money at these clowns is anyone's guess.

Because they are highly respected in management circles. You get the tech view on them and I have to agree that I would never, ever, ever hire them unless you put a gun to my head or something equivalent. But management thinks differently. From what I've grasped, they deliver excellent work, as far as management is concerned - that means regular status updates in easy-to-digest powerpoint slides, solid contract work, and instantly available expertise (if you tell them you need an expert on your big-ass storage system, tomorrow, they'll fly someone in and send you a bill).

All of these and many similar things are like miracles to a beleaguered manager who needs to save his neck from the management layer above him who's asking for his head in order to save their own.