Congressman Criticizes CSC

The chairman of the House committee that oversees the Internal Revenue Service has urged the agency to reconsider its contracts with Computer Sciences Corp. because of the company’s failure to update IRS fraud detection systems.

Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. complaining that the IRS paid Computer Sciences $18.5 million over two years and still has no functioning system.

“It may be an appropriate time to reexamine the dependence of the IRS on the CSC and determine whether the federal government is best served by this particular contractor,” Thomas wrote.

Robert Woodward, a spokesman for El Segundo-based Computer Sciences, said he couldn’t immediately comment on Thomas’ letter.

Computer Sciences said last week that $1.29 billion of its $3.55 billion in first-quarter sales came from its federal government unit. The company has had problems with its IRS contracts in the past.

In 2004, it lost $40 million of a $3-billion contract because of missed deadlines. A year earlier, the agency had put that contract under review.