OPM appears to cancel sole-source award for cloud HR system
Just a week ago, OPM had said the sole-source award to Workday was needed urgently because of a “systemic failure” in its HR infrastructure.
The Office of Personnel Management appears to be walking back the surprise sole-source contract award it made just a week ago for HR information technology services.
On Friday, OPM posted a one-sentence notice on SAM.gov saying that the justification and approval it issued a week earlier, explaining its no-bid award to Workday, was being “canceled in its entirety.”
Spokespeople for OPM and Workday did not immediately respond to inquiries from Federal News Network, and the reasons for canceling the justification document were not immediately clear. Also unclear was whether the government was canceling the $342,200 award entirely, or merely the approval document that allowed the contract to go forward without a competitive bidding process. However, federal contracting experts said the agency would not be able to proceed with the award without a documented justification and approval.
In that now-cancelled document, the office had said it intended to use the company’s cloud-based platform for “end-to-end HR lifecycle support,” including personnel records processing, time and attendance tracking, recruiting and numerous other functions that are currently handled by OPM’s in-house systems.
But officials said those in-house resources — and the personnel that use them — are strained by “a systemic breakdown” in the agency’s HR infrastructure.
“These challenges are further compounded by the presidential hiring freeze memorandum, reforming the federal hiring process and restoring merit to government services memorandum and implementing the president’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’s workforce optimization initiative memorandum, which mandates the submission of a fully compliant, merit-based hiring plan within 120 days and limits new hires to a 4:1 attrition ratio,” officials wrote at the time. “Additionally, increased retirements due to federal workforce reductions place a strain on OPM’s paper-based retirement system, a process which normally takes 3-5 months, a problem an integrated system will help solve.”
OPM had said that in addition to the urgency brought on by the “systemic failure” of its infrastructure, the award needed to be made without competition because a full bidding process would delay the award by six to nine months.
John Weiler, the co-founder of the Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council, disputed that estimated timeline.
“OPM should begin anew with analysis of alternatives and market research that shouldn’t take eight months — they could do it in four months,” he said. “If they had spent their time wisely preparing a legitimate competitive contract versus wasting their time to justify a sole source, we could’ve had a legitimate award now. They could’ve ended up with the same outcome.“
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