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FBO DAILY - FEDBIZOPPS ISSUE OF OCTOBER 28, 2017 FBO #5818
DOCUMENT

R -- STOP Fraud, Waste, and Abuse - Attachment

Notice Date

10/26/2017
 

Notice Type

Attachment
 

NAICS

541611 — Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services
 

Contracting Office

Strategic Acquisition Center - Frederick;Department of Veterans Affairs;321 Ballenger Center Drive, Suite 125;Frederick MD 21703
 

ZIP Code

21703
 

Solicitation Number

36C10X18Q0025
 

Response Due

11/24/2017
 

Archive Date

12/24/2017
 

Point of Contact

Contract Specialist Nathan Bradley
 

E-Mail Address

cting
 

Small Business Set-Aside

N/A
 

Description

Request for Information (RFI) The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is issuing this RFI in accordance with FAR 15.201(e). The agency does not intend to award a contract but rather gather information on capability, delivery and other market information pertinent for acquisition planning. The result of this market research will contribute to determining the method of procurement and identify parties having an interest in and the resources to support this requirement for the following: Background On April 27, 2017, the VA Secretary announced an initiative to Seek to Prevent Fraud, Waste, and Abuse (STOP FWA). This initiative, led by the Acting Assistant Secretary for Management (A/ASM) and implemented by the Program Integrity Office (PIO), will identify, measure, and improve on VA s existing STOP FWA activities. For success, VA recognizes the need for engagement at the executive leadership, management, and front-line employee levels to ensure that FWA is combated at its source. In order to effectively achieve this, individual programs officials retain the responsibility to identify and prevent FWA, while PIO will work to provide the tools for success. For example, in FY 18, PIO is working on a pilot program that includes  an independent assessment of the risk for fraud, waste, and abuse in each of VA s 85 programs and an automated tool to assist in the future risk assessments.   In order to successfully implement SecVA s vision for this initiative, VA needs to transform its business practices to ensure the maximum amount of FWA is prevented. VA also must ensure that legislative requirements specific to the recapture and recovery of improper payments are fully met. Objective VA anticipates the acquisition of services to include assessing existing activities that address known risks, identifying additional risks that leave VA vulnerable to FWA, and developing solutions to mitigate FWA risk for up to 85 programs VA-wide, including, but not limited, to: health care, disability compensation, supplemental income, support of higher education or training, and medically prescribed prosthetics and sensory aids.    Reducing FWA includes both preventing improper loss prior to payment and recovery of FWA payments already made. See attachment A for a complete list of all programs categorized with a subjective rating in high, medium, and low risk. As VA programs may make more than one type of payment (i.e. employee, travel, vendor, purchase card, grantee, beneficiary, etc.), the assessments will cover all payment types. The contractor shall identify and analyze inter-related VA and non-VA data sources to detect widespread or geographically concentrated systemic FWA involving VA employees, vendors, customers, healthcare providers or others wishing to perpetrate FWA. This will be done to identify controls which prevent improper payments and transactions, as well as identifying existing improper payments and transaction activity for remediation and/or recapture and recovery. The contractor s data analytics methodologies, techniques, model developments, business edits, programming coding, and any other analytics capabilities used to identify and prevent FWA will require transparency and knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer will include documentation of the various methods and processes used, and instruction and training to VA personnel on these methods and processes, to permit VA the ability to continue to detect and prevent FWA as well as identify collections for recovery. It is anticipated that the contractor use existing VA tools and platforms in addition to its own tools to address risk, develop models and edits, and perform analytics services. If the contractor uses its own tools, the information must be transferable to VA tools and platforms, and the information remains the property of VA. As such, the contract requires the development of reusable data analytics (including predictive, high risk, and statistical learning models) within VA programs that provide actionable information to determine where to focus its oversight resources for maximum return on investment (ROI). The data analytics employed will be dependent upon the needs of each program and will be tied to the program s risk assessment for fraud, waste, and abuse but will also address any emerging risks identified throughout the performance of the contract. The contractor shall emphasize understanding the risk of FWA specific to VA programs reviewed and solving the problem at hand. For each program VA selects the contractor shall: Assess program vulnerability for FWA, assess current program capability to stop FWA, identify current capability gaps and develop corrective action plans to remediate.  Corrective actions may include recommending changes to existing systems and processes, and developing or refining specific business rules to improve prepayment edits and developing or revising written program policies to reflect the remediation. The gap analysis shall include a methodology to quantify (monetize) all improvements both as an ROI and ongoing savings once deployed. The assessment of program vulnerabilities and the existing gaps to identify or mitigate them shall address, but not be limited, to: Addressing risk exposure that may include FWA perpetrated by providers, beneficiaries, vendors, grantees, employees, and other business associates of VA. Any capability gaps identified by the contractor to mitigate exposure should utilize appropriate data analytics with qualitative and quantitative reviews (such as predictive analytics, fraud modeling, text mining technologies, and forensic audit techniques) to accurately identify the potential ROI for any proposed techniques to mitigate the risks identified. Qualitative and quantitative methods should include mechanisms to minimize false positives and accurately identify inappropriate patterns of transaction activity and improper payments to stop or recover them. The potential contractor shall place importance on creating business rules, operational procedures, and related controls and developing tools to detect inappropriate transactions prior to commitment or payment, including appropriate follow-up needed to eliminate false positives and identify definitive payments that can either be stopped pre-payment or recaptured post-payment. The follow-up will include case management by which the preliminary modeling result leads will be reviewed by the contractor to determine if predicted FWA instances are confirmed or are false positives. The contractor shall address those gaps identified using varied techniques (to include plug-n-play tools, such as claim edit software) of existing business rules and refine where applicable, as well as, implementation of new tools, and use of advanced analytics technologies and forensic audit techniques to develop supervised (e.g. classification, value prediction) and unsupervised (e.g. clustering, association rules) data mining algorithms and statistical and machine learning tools that identify potential FWA. Perform recovery audits and collections on payment activities resulting from the application of appropriate data analytics that detected post-payment FWA. The recovery audit efforts will include documentation of the various forensic accounting and data analytics methods and processes used to permit VA the ability to continue to identify tangible potential collections for recovery as part of ROI. All payments recommended for recapture will include full documentation required to support the recapture. The potential contractor will provide sustainable tools and methods for post-payment fraud detection that maximize opportunities for payment recovery. Perform monthly reporting of collections including analysis of cause and recommended corrective actions. The contractor will employ an iterative process to continually assess the results of the applied FWA gap assessment remediation from task 1a to refine the deployed tools to ultimately lead to greater accuracy of business rules and models. Track all pre-payment and recovery collections, including methodology to reliably estimate future fraud, waste, and abuse that was prevented due to pre-payment activities, in order to reliably report ROI on VA investment. Contractor shall report actual and projected savings with respect to improper payments recovered; actual and projected savings with respect to improper payments avoided; actual and projected savings relative to the return on investment for the use of predictive analytics technologies; and actual and projected savings relative to the return on investment for the use of predictive analytics technologies in comparison to other strategies or technologies. THERE IS NO SOLICITATION AT THIS TIME. This request for capabilities information does not constitute a request for proposals; submission of any information in response to this market survey is purely voluntary; the government assumes no financial responsibility for any costs incurred. If your organization has the potential capacity to perform these contract services, please provide the following information: Organization name, address, email address, website address, telephone number, business size, NAICS code; DUNS, SIN Category and GSA Schedule (if applicable). Answers to the following questions: Provide a brief description of contracts of a similar nature (size, scope, and complexity) that your company has handled in the past 3 years, to include responses to the following questions. In your response, please specify the percentage of the work completed by your own employees and by other teaming partners. Specify experience designing and delivering data analytics with low false positives that identify provider, beneficiary and identify theft, contracting, and/or internal employee FWA across a wide variety of services or payment types. How did you devise a baseline and use both qualitative and quantitative techniques to identify outliers (false positives) and incorporate testing to justify assumptions and methodologies? What types of forensic accounting and data analytics (e.g. descriptive, prescriptive, diagnostic, and predictive) has your company used successfully in past projects? Describe examples of how the type of data analytics applied in specific cases resulted in project success. What other skills and capabilities do you have that is important in performing the work? Complete the table below with information about current or past contracts that include contingent or incentive fees based on the results of data analytics and qualitative and quantitative assessment reviews. Contract Number Contracting Officer Email Address Type of Contract (FFP with incentive) Provide examples of where you have used data analytics/qualitative and quantitative assessment results to transform business practices across an organization. Describe your processes for identifying anomalies in the data, eliminating false positives, investigating and arbitrating identified instances, and queueing for collection. Would your proposed solution require the development of an IT system/product? How would reliably report the ROI for VA s investment to include methodology for accurately estimating future payments that will be prevented because of new processes implemented that prevent the need for identification and recapture post-payment? STRUCTURE AND SUBMISSION OF RESPONSES Contractors should respond to this RFI by Friday November 24, 2017 by 2:00 PM EST via e-mail to Nathan.Bradley2@va.gov and Melissa.Maloy@va.gov. Limit all responses to 20 pages.
 

Web Link

FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/spg/VA/AFMLOVASS/VASSMD/36C10X18Q0025/listing.html)
 

Document(s)

Attachment
 

File Name: 36C10X18Q0025 36C10X18Q0025.docx (https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=3875155&FileName=36C10X18Q0025-000.docx)

Link: https://www.vendorportal.ecms.va.gov/FBODocumentServer/DocumentServer.aspx?DocumentId=3875155&FileName=36C10X18Q0025-000.docx

 

Note: If links are broken, refer to Point of Contact above or contact the FBO Help Desk at 877-472-3779.
 

Record

SN04723682-W 20171028/171026230824-2dbbd19495331e44f066f33af158f65f (fbodaily.com)
 

Source

FedBizOpps Link to This Notice
(may not be valid after Archive Date)

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