Well, isn’t that cozy.
Background: this is from a 2009 judgement by the Maryland State Board of Contract Appeals on an appeal by tech firm Accenture alleging a most traditional conflict of interest in a job bid process (a process that Accenture lost, and a firm called ACS won): “According to Appellant, [then-Chief Information Officer for the Maryland Department of Human Resources] Ms. [Isabel] FitzGerald is married to a Mr. Paul FitzGerald who Accenture claims “is a Principal at the firm Deloitte, LLP, and ACS identified Deloitte as a subcontractor for ACS on this procurement.”” Turns out that the appeals court didn’t buy that argument. OK.
Now let us fast forward to 2014. The existing Maryland state exchange is collapsing, and the state is desperate to salvage what they can from the wreck: “…the board overseeing Maryland’s health exchange voted unanimously Tuesday to ask federal officials for their approval — and $40 million to $50 million more in funding — to hire Deloitte Consulting to replicate its work on the exchange in Connecticut.” And, yes, Mr. Fitzgerald is still at Deloitte. And where is Mrs. Fitzgerald? Still the MD DHR CIO?
Well… not exactly. From the same article:
[Maryland Governor Martin] O’Malley said Friday that the state is hiring a company to do independent audits of how the Connecticut fix would be implemented. Maryland Health Secretary Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, chairman of the state exchange board, said that unlike the first effort, this one will be overseen by the state’s top IT professional, Isabel FitzGerald, secretary of the Department of Information Technology.
So, basically, the person in the Maryland state government who will be determining whether Deloitte is doing its job properly when it comes to fixing the failed state exchange is married to one of the high muckety-mucks of Deloitte. …Well, I feel better about the Maryland state exchange already. Don’t you feel better about the Maryland state exchange, now?
Moe Lane
PS: This happens all the time in this part of the country. And the problem with expecting the voting public to simply trust our self-appointed elites when they say that we shouldn’t worry about them and their crony ways when it comes to fixing the Obamacare problem is that those same elites said the same thing when it came to the Obamacare roll-out. The well of our trust is, as they say, dry.
Sadly, if the well of trust of the voters were really dry, then you would see less incumbents reelected. You don’t, so it isn’t.