I am not sure what it means, but there has been an ironic coincidence to be seen in the change of consulting firms handling the troubled Obamacare website.
The new firm is to be Accenture.The firm that is being fired is CGI, according to the Washington Post.
Accenture is a major and rapidly expanding user of H-1B workers. CGI's use, in the last three years, has been more or less stable. Bear in mind, in both cases, that the vast majority of each firm's workers labored on something other than the health insurance website. We don't know the level of H-1B staffing on that project for either firm.
Here are the numbers of H-1B Labor Conditions Application (LCA) certifications over the last three years for the two firms:
| Year | Accenture | CGI |
| 2013 | 5,727 | 344 |
| 2012 | 2,208 | 284 |
| 2011 | 1,541 | 289 |
The source of the data is MyVisaJob.Com, and its source is the U.S. Department of Labor. Securing an LCA is the first step in the H-1B process, and often a firm secures more, often many more, LCAs for H-1Bs than it actually uses.
In the case of CGI, the internal segment working on the government's website is known; it is CGI Federal. That level of detail is not available for Accenture.
CGI Federal is apparently a small division of that company, as its receipt of H-1B certifications in recent years has been 15 in 2013, 24 in 2012, and 28 in 2011, using the same source as above.
While both companies have large American operations, neither is a U.S. firm. Accenture arose from the ashes of the global accounting firm Arthur Andersen after that firm was destroyed because of its involvement in the Enron scandal of a dozen years ago. Accenture is Dublin-based and its 2012 revenues were about $28 billion.
CGI stands for "Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique" in French, and is a Canadian firm. Its 2012 revenues were just shy of $5 billion.