Serco does a lot of contracted government work, a lot in intelligence as you can see from the video below taken from the home page and they run air traffic control towers in the U.S..  Serco is a British company with a US division.  Serco is headquartered in Reston, VA (Washington, DC metro area) with locations in 45 states, four Canadian provinces and 14 countries around the world.  Wells Fargo is listed as one of their commercial human capital accounts.  You can find their long list of government agencies here to include the CIA, SEC, Post Office, National Intelligence, Federal Reserve and lots more.  Here’s another page that outlines their IT Lifecycle programs.  It is a public company traded on the London Stock Exchange. 

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The company does sell cloud services as well and one might wonder if part of the entire exchange business might be destined partially to have some cloud functionality as we don’t know how the COBOL mainframes are going to work when they are tapped out, sure stick a lot of Xeon processors in there but it still may not scale well enough.  This has never been done before.  This article said Serco did not have experience with exchanges, but gee, read their website and this doesn’t’ appear to be an engineering issue for them with everything else they have engineered, but we do need the time to do it.  They will be taking care of the “tax penalties” area of this so I’m assuming that means connecting and engineering to the IRS COBOL system.  The initial contract is for a year. 

There was a little concern here about United owning QSSi and building the actual federal data hub so here we go putting a platform in the middle, more middle ware and more expense.  It would have been easier to just deny United the purchase of QSSI to me, but subsidiaries is where all the action takes place and they have plenty of it and it helps keep them under the radar as publicly the tiered subsidiaries are not well known. 

Health Insurance Business Under the Radar With Tiered Subsidiaries–Where All the Action Takes Place With Mergers, Acquisitions and Profit Centers-Subsidiary Watch

And in the meantime we have this with a House investigation thinking this is an “oversight”..oversight my you know what!  They don’t get it but maybe now they will with adding yet more expense to the necessary IT Infrastructure.  I have been writing for a couple of years about this in the fact that “the short order code kitchen burned down years ago and there was no fire sale” when it comes to IT Infrastructure as what do you think Serco’s contract is for?  Maybe this is sticking in the head of our HHS director too, finally after talking about “hurrying up Health IT”…some folks would be better with a little silence at times if they don’t understand the time and the money. 

Speed Up Rate of Change in Health IT?–“Short Order Code Kitchen Burned Down a Few Years Ago and There Was No Fire Sale”..IT Infrastructure Chance and Revisions Takes a Lot of ”Code”, “Time” and “ Most Importantly Money”

Here’s another view of what Serco does on an international basis with an Australian twist. 

Of course as citizens we are all worried about data out of context being used against us and for good reason, we have seen it already with queries from insurers and their biz intelligence that don’t make sense and we spend hours, weeks and more fighting it.  They use it analytically out of context and once in a while they get caught…like United did years ago.  If you want to know more about Algo Duping there are some videos here that help explain how all this works with math models that lie sometimes and nobody checks for accuracy, how the banks have done it for years. 

So with all the NSA controversy and with Snowden still at large, we now have yet one more big intelligence contractor coming into the area of exchanges?  The more I write about this and how the models designed by banks and insurers have moved the money (as they are just really software companies anymore with powerful algorithms to do so) the more we need a single payer plan.  This is ridiculous and it won’t get any better until models and the companies and banks who create them are held accountable.  

Software platforms build on each other and when you look at what a monster the exchanges have turned out to be without someone with some IT experience running HHS, well you can see now how executives in high places are killing us without a “little” hands on in their backgrounds and the rest of this is history.  I said back in 2009 and this is not personal that an HHS director without “some” tech or IT experience would be totally overrun and duped…insurers have done a good job of this while padding their own pockets and we all suffer.  This is not Clinton era technology, way beyond that now and we need different people who can see that and not rely on old methodologies and being bliss. 

Nancy-Ann DeParle and Kathleen Sebelius – Business Intelligence?

Right now am I excited to see all this come out, no way because it’s a mess and my hat’s off to all the IT people at states levels and those who have put hours and days, weeks, months and years of hard work into the project and those folks don’t get enough credit and the general public has no clue on the toll it takes with intelligence, tired brains and re-write code over and over and over when some politician wants a change made, but they do it.  So here we go, one more contract and more expense and a big lack of project management as the top is lacking some IT hands on experience and it sticks out like a sore thumb.  BD 


WASHINGTON — Racing to meet an October deadline, Obama administration officials said Thursday that they had awarded a contract worth as much as $1.2 billion to a British company to help them sift applications for health insurance and tax credits under the new health care law.

The company, Serco, has extensive experience as a government contractor with the Defense Department and intelligence agencies, and it also manages air traffic control towers in 11 states and reviews visa applications for the State Department. But it has little experience with the Department of Health and Human Services or the insurance marketplaces, known as exchanges, where individuals and small businesses are supposed to be able to shop for insurance.

Serco will help the Obama administration and states determine who is eligible for insurance subsidies, in the form of tax credits, and who might qualify for Medicaid. Tasks include “intake, routing, review and troubleshooting of applications,” according to the contract.

Serco will also help the administration decide who is entitled to exemptions from the tax penalties that can be imposed on people who go without health insurance starting next year.

The government said it could expand and extend the initial 12-month contract, bringing its potential value to $1.2 billion over five years. Mr. Hill said the contract could be “one of the largest we’ve won” in the United States, where Serco has 8,000 employees and more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue.

The Government Accountability Office found that the administration had spent $394 million on contracts to establish federal insurance exchanges. More than three-fourths of the money went to 10 companies. They include CGI Federal, a subsidiary of a Canadian company, the CGI Group ($88 million); Quality Software Services Inc. ($55 million); and Booz Allen Hamilton ($38 million).

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/health/british-company-is-awarded-contract-to-administer-health-rollout.html?smid=tw-nytimeshealth&seid=auto

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