The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) has awarded Omni Federal a $427 million contract to support the modernization of the National Background Investigation Services (NBIS).
The NBIS – which is overseen by the DCSA – is the Federal government’s IT system for end-to-end personnel vetting.
However, a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed that the NBIS system has run into challenges that have presented problems for many Federal agencies in adapting their personnel vetting IT systems.
The DCSA announced the award in a notice posted to SAM.gov on June 5, saying that it was “a competitive, Time-and-Materials contract for Secure Cloud Landing Zone and Development, Security and Operations (DevSecOps) Capabilities to support the modernization” of the NBIS.
“For this requirement, it is not possible at the time of placing the contract to accurately estimate the extent or duration of the work or to anticipate costs with any reasonable degree of certainty because of the evolving DoD security requirements, evolving NBIS requirements, and unknown degree of software code modernization requirements, and required variation in tasks,” the notice says.
The NBIS program is currently undergoing a digital transformation. It aims to support the government’s Trusted Workforce 2.0 (TW 2.0) – launched in 2018 – by reducing onboarding time, enabling workforce mobility, and improving insights into workforce behaviors.
In January, DCSA launched a new product roadmap for NBIS to help its customer agencies better plan their transition to use of the system as outlined in the Federal TW 2.0 policy.
A month before that, DCSA also announced that it had fully transitioned all required customer agencies to its NBIS eApp for the initiation of background investigations.