GAO sustains protests of DHS $450M award to CACI

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GAO sustains protests of DHS $450M award to CACI

The Government Accountability Office sustained protests from two losing bidders under the Transformation and System Consolidation (TASC) program, say government...

Federal News Network Staff

March 10, 2011 12:48 pm

2 min read

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
Federal News Radio

The Homeland Security Department’s back-office consolidation is facing another delay.

The Government Accountability Office sustained protests from two losing bidders under the Transformation and System Consolidation (TASC) program, say government and industry sources.

Richard Spires, DHS chief information officer, confirmed GAO’s decision.

“We need to upgrade some of our financial systems. There is no doubt about it,” Spires said Thursday after speaking at an event on IT reform at the Center for American Progress in Washington. “We are disappointed. We will have to go back and regroup. I was in a meeting this morning and we were talking about our alternatives. We are assessing that right now. I can’t give you a timeline of when we will give an assessment of what we will do next. There is a lot of us involved in trying to now assess based on what GAO told us what are the appropriate next steps for us as a department.”

Global Computer Enterprises and Savantage Solutions protested DHS’s award of a $450 million contract to CACI in November.

GAO is expected to release its decision today.

Under TASC, DHS will integrate several back-office systems, including those that run their financial, acquisition and asset management applications.

This was the second protest of TASC. When DHS issued the RFP in 2008, Savantage protested it shortly thereafter.

CACI declined to comment, saying in an email, “The government has requested we not discuss the decision.”

GCE also declined to comment on GAO’s decision. Requests for comments from Savantage were not immediately returned.

TASC was one of the 20 financial management systems reviewed by the Office of Management last year. OMB gave DHS the go-ahead to continue with TASC.

According to the federal IT dashboard, DHS expects to spend about $11 million on TASC in 2011. Spires gave the program a two out of five rating as of Feb. 25.