• The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent body that aims to protect federal workers from bias, awarded a $46,606 contract to a professional staffing company to help the quasi-judicial agency carry out an investigation into “allegations of gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, and abuse of management authority, as well as alleged violations of the Privacy Act, labor relations laws and other laws governing the management of federal employees.” The contractor, Addx Corporation, and the agency’s inspector general will be expected to complete the findings by April 25, according to documents. No other details were provided.
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is paying nearly $4.2 million to Accurate Biometrics, a Chicago company that specializes in live-scan fingerprinting, to handle its background checks. The agency requires fingerprint-based background checks for Medicare providers and suppliers in order to cut down on fraud and waste, the agency says.
• The Georgia Tech Research Institute, a nonprofit arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, won a Defense Department contract to help it “identify potential challenges and gaps in processes, procedures … as well as technology for countering the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD),” called Project Thunderstorm. The contract is worth $21,000 and will entail a series of “activities and demonstrations,” including “a tabletop simulation and a field demonstration that follows the movement of a simulated WMD cargo and related person(s) from a source country to its point of entry on U.S. shores via maritime pathways.”
• The Bureau of Fiscal Service, which is essentially the federal accountant’s office housed within the Treasury Department, is spending a maximum of about $4.54 million to store microfilm records in a 12,000 square-foot “restricted and secure” space in Jacksonville, Fla. The agency asks for another 200-square-feet of space, which will be used to search and read the microfilm. DateSavers of Jacksonville Inc. won the contract, which could last up to four and a half years. In President Obama’s most recent budget, he called on the agency to digitize the most frequently searched microfilm.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded a $5.1 million contract to Schatz Publishing Group. They will operate the agency’s toll-free National Flood Insurance Program phone lines for customers, giving general information to callers and help with policy inquiries, in addition to referring callers to flood insurance agents and “phone support in the event of a flooding event,” according to documents.
Contract information compiled from General Services Administration data and government press releases. Send announcements about government contracts to mwilson@digital-staging.thehill.com.