NIH cuts fees on governmentwide IT contracts

The office that manages one of the largest governmentwide IT acquisition contracts is lowering its fees, meaning big savings for agency customers.

The National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center — a part of the Department of Health and Human Services — Tuesday dropped the fee-for-service rates on three of its largest government contracts, one of which saw a 35 percent reduction in its fee.

NITAAC reduced its Chief Information Officer – Solutions and Partners III fee from 1 percent to .65 percent; its CIO-SP3 Small Business fee from .75 percent to .55 percent; and its CIO – Commodity Solutions fee from .50 percent to .35 percent. While these vehicles are built with health IT customers throughout HHS in mind, NITAAC has tailored its GWACs to be able to support the mission-critical needs of CIO shops throughout the federal government.

“We’re doing all we can to improve efficiencies in our own program, so we can pass those savings along to our government-wide customers,” NITAAC Program Director Robert Coen said in a statement. “We don’t believe in cutting corners on customer service, and everything we’ve done in the last year proves it. When you can combine better services with lower fees as we have, you are truly delivering value to your customers.”

This fee reduction, an NIH spokeswoman said, is the “broadest” in the program’s history, and it makes NITAAC’s fees comparable to other GWAC’s, like the General Services Administration’s Alliant and NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement V, with fees of .75 percent and .39 percent, respectively. It’s common practice for agencies running these contracts for other departments to take fees to cover their overhead operating costs.

“I’m so glad to be able to offer further savings to our government-wide customers,” Coen said. “We can help our clients stretch their dollars much further when they choose NITAAC for their IT acquisitions.”

The news comes on the heels of a banner year for NITAAC, in which it awarded contracts to 65 vendors under the new CIO-CS GWAC, a 10-year, $20-billion ceiling follow-on vehicle to the Electronic Commodity Store III GWAC, and expanded offerings under its Assisted Acquisition Services vehicle to all Defense Department agencies.