Public employees hired to create and build Healthcare.gov were not trained or managed properly to successfully complete their duties, according to a federal audit.
The report, issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), analyzed the 20 contracts crucial to the site's development over 11 months. Here's a summary of what the audit uncovered:
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The contracts went to eight different companies and together, they're worth more than $600 million, with 70 percent of that paid out already paid out.
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"Lapses in oversight," as the OIG puts it, began well before Healthcare.gov's launch in October 2013. And the site struggled with numerous technical issues after it launched.
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New federal regulation implemented January 2012 required employees overseeing contracts worth more than $10 million to partake in 96 hours of training. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), however, disregarded this mandate. One employee, for instance, oversaw a $130 million contract for at least 15 months without receiving the lower-level certification requirement.
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Additionally, certain contracting staff members have yet to complete the required levels of training and won't meet federal standards until October 2016.
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CMS was unable to provide auditors with so-called routine documents they had requested.
In light of the audit, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services declined to say if any employees had been terminated, Bloomberg reports.
This isn't the first federal audit that revealed mishaps associated with Healthcare.gov. Earlier this year, an OIG report confirmed that CMS did not plan appropriately for the marketplace's launch. What's more, findings from the earlier report confirmed the suspicions of lawmakers who questioned the selection of certain contractors for Healthcare.gov.
For more:
- check out the audit
- here's the Bloomberg article