GSA resumes work under contested contract for PIV services
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The General Services Administration is still on target to help agencies meet next month's deadline to begin issuing Personal Identity Verification cards, even though its contract to provide these services is under investigation, a top GSA official has said.
The General Services Administration is still on target to help agencies meet next month's deadline to begin issuing Personal Identity Verification cards, even though its contract to provide these services is under investigation, a top GSA official has said.
David Temoshok, director of GSA's ID Management Division, said the agency still expects to begin issuing PIV cards before Oct. 27, the date by which, under Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12, all agencies must start producing the cards for new employees and contractors.
GSA missed more than a week of work earlier this month because three companies'Lockheed Martin Corp., EDS Corp. and Xtec Inc. of Miami'protested the agency's contract for turnkey HSPD-12 solutions with BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va.
Xtec and EDS filed their protests with the Government Accountability Office, while Lockheed filed its protest with GSA.
The protest forced GSA to stop working on the agreement, although it restarted the contract early this month after determining that it is a matter of national security.
'We're keeping the target dates we established' when the contract was awarded, Temoshok said after speaking at an HSPD-12 conference in Washington. 'These have always been very aggressive dates, and we're keeping to them.'
Meanwhile, Temoshok confirmed that 13 agencies have signed up with GSA under the BearingPoint deal. Besides GSA, other agencies are the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Treasury departments; the Federal Communications Commission; the Office of Personnel Management; the Central Intelligence Agency; the National Archives and Records Administration; the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the Federal Reserve Bank; and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
He estimated that, at this point, GSA will be placing orders for between 250,000 and 500,000 PIV cards, although the agency is hoping for more.
Under the BearingPoint deal, the more agencies that sign up, the lower the prices become for services.
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