A company holding two state contracts worth $32.8 million was the lead IT contractor of the ill-fated Affordable Health Care enrollment web page rollout late last year, LouisianaVoice has learned.
CGI Technologies and Solutions, headquartered in Quebec Province, has experienced problems with other contracts in Canada and the U.S. even before the Obamacare debacle.
The largest tech firm in Canada, CGI also has offices in the Washington, D.C. area—Fairfax and Manassas, VA., Washington and Baltimore, and is part of the CGI Group which has 72,000 employees in 400 offices worldwide—many of those in India.
CGI Technologies and Solutions was awarded a $32.5 million contract with the Office of Community Development’s (OCD) Disaster Recovery Unit (DRU) on March 2, 2012 to provide computer software hosting, support and training for OCD’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), small rental programs.
That contract is scheduled to run out on March 1, 2015.
CGI also has a $300,000 contract with the Office of Information Services to provide technical support for the Division of Administration’s (DOA) advanced financial system (AFS). That contract is set to expire on June 30.
The state also has a $20 million contract with Hunt Guillot & Associates of Ruston through OCD and DRU for grant management activities for infrastructure and other projects undertaken as a result of damages resulting from hurricanes Katrina, Rita in 2005 and Gustav and Ike in 2008.
The Hunt, Guillot contract was first issued for $18.2 million on Oct. 31, 2007—just 10 months after Gov. Bobby Jindal took office, and called for the firm to work in program design, the pre-application and application process, pre-construction and construction of projects related to hurricane recovery. That contract expired on Oct. 30, 2010, but the company was awarded a subsequent contract of $1 million on Dec. 1, 2009 which called for it to review applications for grant funds pursuant to the hazard mitigation grant.
It was not immediately clear how much, if any, overlap there might be between the CGI and Hunt, Guillot contracts, if one was intended to augment the other, or if the two are completely separate, unrelated contracts.
What is clear is that in April of 2013, less than a year ago, the Legislative Auditor issued a report which indicated the state could be on the hook for a minimum of $116 million and possibly as much as $600 million in improperly received or misspent disaster aid following Katrina and Rita.
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/04/louisiana_on_for_misspent_road.html.
State auditors reviewed 24 loans to property owners through the state’s Small Rental Property Program. The state had allocated $663 million to the program and of the 24 cases reviewed, none had been flagged as problematic by OCD. Though only 24 cases were reviewed, more than 8,000 properties benefitted from the assistance program—increasing the likelihood that the total number and amount of improper payments could go significantly higher.
OCD Executive Director Patrick Forbes said rather than attempt to chase down homeowners to retrieve the misspent funds, he intends to change OCD regulations to provide more assistance to homeowners before “triggering the recapture of funds.”
Despite that statement of intent, a month after that audit report, on May 21, the administration issued a $600,000 contract to the Baton Rouge law firm of Shows, Cali & Walsh to “review and analyze Road Home files for overpayments, ineligible grantees, etc., (and to) negotiate and collect funds due to the state.”
Shows, Cali & Wash, meanwhile, has its own problems stemming from a federal judge’s findings that it manipulated evidence in a federal lawsuit by three death row inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. https://louisianavoice.com/2014/01/03/baton-rouge-law-firm-with-3-million-in-state-contracts-faces-legal-sanctions-over-evidence-manipulation-in-angola-lawsuit/.
Meanwhile, the ObamaCare project—healthcare.com—disaster appears to have had caused a negative impact on employee morale at CGI, according to a staff worker who asked not to be identified. “There’s a lot of frustration,” he said. “People are getting sick, fainting in conference calls.”
Employee turnover is said to be high at CGI, making matters more complicated when trying to assemble a web page for the health-care exchange. Despite that, the upper management mentality at CGI appears to work toward establishing relations “so intimate with the client that decoupling becomes almost impossible,” according to one company profile. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/meet-cgi-federal-the-company-behind-the-botched-launch-of-healthcare-gov/.
CGI was hired by the Hawaii Health Connector, that state’s new health exchange for providing insurance options under ObamaCare, to build its website and the state portal, like HealthCare.gov, had immediate problems when it launched on Oct. 1, 2013. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/23/red-flags-company-behind-obamacare-site-has-checkered-past/.
“The morning I heard CGI was behind (the Obamacare web page development), I said, ‘My God, no wonder that thing doesn’t work,’” said James Bagnola, a Texas corporate consultant who was hired by the Hawaii Department of Taxation in 2008. “The system is broken all the time.” Bagnola said CGI was able to continue work on the Hawaii project despite repeated managerial complaints and a “corrosive environment” in which state employees felt pitted against CGI staff.
CGI’s contract to design and execute a new $46.2 million diabetes registry for eHealth Ontario, part of the Canadian government health care system, was canceled in September of 2012 after a series of delays that rendered the system obsolete.
The state of Vermont as recently as last October, meanwhile, was considering whether or not to penalize CGI for not meeting deadlines for designing and producing that state’s health care exchange as per an $84 million contract with the company.
It may be too early to say that there is an “ominous pattern” of inferior work product from CGI as claimed by some http://www.examiner.com/article/is-cgi-and-white-house-liable-for-obamacare-massive-site-failure and http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/fobbs/131028 but there can be no denial that the failed debut of the ObamaCare web page has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Which raises the obvious question: What quality of work Louisiana is receiving from the firm? Considering last April’s findings of the Legislative Auditor in its examination of the Road Home program, that’s a fair question.
Contractors are being paid tens of millions of dollars to provide oversight of the grant programs in the hurricane recovery efforts. But what oversight is being provided of the contractors themselves? And if the contractors need oversight, why are they even in the equation to begin with?
How do we know they are doing the jobs they are being paid to do?
If we are to believe the auditor’s report, they well may not be giving the state a return on its dollar.
Are contracts simply being doled out by the Jindal administration with little or no vetting? When one looks at some of the other contracts awarded since 2008, there seems to be ample cause for concern.
All one has to do is study the administration’s smarmy record of questionable contracts, beginning with the hiring of Goldman Sachs to help write the request for proposals (RFP) for the privatization of the Office of Group Benefits (OGB). Who was the sole bidder on that project at the outset before the project was re-bid? Goldman Sachs. https://louisianavoice.com/2013/12/01/jindal-and-rainwater-preoccupied-with-ogb-privatization-missed-or-chose-to-ignore-obvious-cnsi-contract-red-flags/
And then there was the infamous contract with CNSI http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/volpe/billionaire-swindlers-line-up-for-obamacare/
and the ensuing investigation by the FBI https://louisianavoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/fbireportscnsi3.pdf
https://louisianavoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/dt-common-streams-streamserver1.pdf and the Louisiana Attorney General’s office https://louisianavoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/ldoj-interview-report-on-cnsi-from-0514121.pdf
There also is a series of contracts with Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), since absorbed by Xerox. ACS, once represented by U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy’s sister-in-law Jan Cassidy who now works for the Division of Administration (DOA) as Assistant Commissioner in Procurement and Technology at an annual salary of $150,000). http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jan-cassidy/6/4aa/703
ACS also has its own string of problems as evidenced by stories from other states https://louisianavoice.com/2013/03/15/doa-hires-jan-cassidy-sister-in-law-of-cong-bill-cassidy-at-150000-previous-employers-records-are-less-than-stellar/ and with the Securities Exchange Commission http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2010/lr21643.htm
Not to be outdone, Deloitte Consulting which helped the state in planning for a comprehensive consolidation of information technology (IT) services for DOA, was named winner of the state contract for “Information Technology Planning and Management Support Services,” according to an email announcement that went out to IT employees last September.
Never mind the fact that Deloitte Consulting has experienced a multitude of problems in North Carolina, California, Tennessee, and Virginia because of delays, false starts and cost overruns. https://louisianavoice.com/2013/09/05/surprise-surprise-gomer-deloitte-wins-it-contract-after-spending-year-consulting-with-state-on-consolidation-plan/
And yet this governor is so unyielding in his misguided belief that the private sector can perform any and every governmental function better than public employees that now, six years into his eight-year term, he has decided pay yet another contractor, the international consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, $4 million to conduct an efficiency study to determine possible savings in state government.
Clueless, thy name is Jindal.
Louisiana Voice 
I’m sure there are reasons for all these – not necessarily good reasons or reasons to which we will be privy, but reasons nonetheless. P. S. I don’t think I’ve seen “smarmy” used quite that way, Tom 😉
Well, one of the definitions/synonyms I found was “slimy,” so I figured the word was appropriate enough.
CGI has an obviously EXCELLENT track record. . . . Of putting taxpayer money into the company shareholders’ pockets.
I wonder if Jindal might be one of those share holders?
I’d be more interested in whether or not the share holders are contributors to Jindal’s campaign war chest. Much as I dislike Jindal, I doubt he’d do something as hamfistedly stupid as to push a contract toward a company in which he has direct interest. His job jumping indicates a man with one eye always to the future.
[…] complete story is well reviewed by Tom Aswell in Louisiana Voice. Other sources are: NOLA Misspent Road Home & Federal Disaster Aid Failures – Obamacare […]
http://www.hga-llc.com/company/index.html has a picture of Hunt, Guillot and Associates founders, including a Jay Guillot who bears a strong resemblance to a BESE member of the same name. Also on the web page is a picture of an expensive-looking project at Chalmette High School, a project managed by Hunt, Guillot and Associates at a school overseen by BESE. Cozy, eh?
I found an earlier post on this site (https://louisianavoice.com/2011/12/18/guillot-gets-ethics-board-okay-to-serve-on-bese-and-hold-state-contracts-aswell-has-no-legal-standing-for-inquiry/) suggesting that Mr. Guillot would have had to resign by June 30, 2013, for his firm to be able to participate in state contracts. But he didn’t. Perhaps Hunt, Guillot and Associates will no longer seek work overseen by BESE?
Quebec is a Province of Canada. A Province there is like a State here. Toronto is a City in Canada. Toronto is not in the Province of Quebec, it is in the Province of Ontario. Saying the company is headquartered in Quebec, Toronto is similar to saying a company is headquartered in Louisiana, Dallas. I see that you have copied this error from widespread articles which have the same error. Not good for your credibility.
You are absolutely correct. The error was not “copied,” however; like any reporter, we rely on sources and the source I cited (with the appropriate link attached) was incorrect and I did not catch the error.
I appreciate your keen eye and of course Toronto is in Ontario, not Quebec. Montreal is in Quebec.
I apologize for the error and it has now been corrected.
Mr. Wadleigh, interesting with all of this info provided, that you would focus on the credibility of the man reporting the abuse to the public rather than focusing on the abuse itself. Amidst the corruption reported, is Tom’s misuse of a province in Canada the most important issue on this post about which you chose to offer comment?? Is anyone home?
This is the same kind of tactic reflected by Ginger Sawyer’s comment on one of Tom’s December posts: “Wonder if Aswell is now the Democrats’ paid hit man?”. These “shoot the messenger” comments and baseless name-calling are familiar fallbacks when the critic can’t come up with a credible opposing view. But, I think ole Tom can handle it and his work speaks for itself.
One of the things I like about Tom is that he will admit a mistake and correct it, not tap dance around and try to justify the error OR ignore it. I think his credibility is just fine.
Quebec, Toronto…umm, those are two cities or perhaps one province and one city. They do not go together. Toronto, Ontario or Quebec City, Quebec
Or in Quebec City and Toronto Or in Ontario and Quebec
Perhaps just say Canada.
Yeah American Geography!
thanks for the geography lesson Michelle but I’m more focused on the abuse of Jindal administration and the endless courage demonstrated by Tom, who works tirelessly to expose it, free of charge!
CGI may have more problems headed it’s way: http://www.newser.com/story/179614/healthcaregov-contractors-dodgy-past-slipped-by-feds.html. Won’t vouch for the source, but it it potentially very interesting.