GSA Awards First Task Orders Under $2.5 Billion Payroll Modernization Contract

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Under the orders, Carahsoft Technology Corporation and Grant Thornton will roll out commercial payroll systems that would be available for all civilian agencies.

The General Services Administration on Thursday awarded the first task orders under a multibillion dollar contract to overhaul the government’s payroll and scheduling systems.

The task orders, awarded to Carahsoft Technology Corporation and Grant Thornton, support the administration’s NewPay initiative, a 10-year, $2.5 billion effort to create governmentwide shared services for payroll, scheduling and leave management. The two companies are the primary contractors on the NewPay blanket purchase agreement, which GSA awarded last year.

By promoting shared services for workforce management, the NewPay initiative aims to make to make the systems more efficient and user-friendly. Civilian agencies rely on more than 100 different systems to manage some 2.2 million employees, but through NewPay, GSA intends to help agencies embrace a more nimble software-as-a-service solution housed in the cloud.

Last year, the White House made shared services adoption a major focus of the President’s Management Agenda.

Under the task orders, the companies and their industry teams will begin standing up two commercial payroll systems that GSA will eventually make available to agencies across government. The Carahsoft team, which also includes Immix Technology and Deloitte, will provide Kronos and SAP systems, and the second team is led by Grant Thornton team, with also includes the Arcanum Group and CGI Federal, will stand up an Infor system, according to GSA.

The task order to Carahsoft Technology Corporation is valued $4.7 million, and the order to Grant Thornton is worth $4.9 million, a GSA spokesperson told Nextgov.

“Today’s NewPay task orders are an important step in modernizing our federal payroll system as we move forward in providing quality shared services,” GSA Administrator Emily Murphy said in a statement. “We look forward to working with the Carahsoft and Grant Thornton teams as they provide SaaS solutions to ensure constant innovation and security in our payroll services.”

In February, GSA received an additional $20.7 million from the Technology Modernization Fund to support the NewPay initiative.