A Kodiak Native corporation's federal-contracting arm wins medical-billing work in Oklahoma

A subsidiary of Koniag, the Alaska Native regional corporation for the Kodiak Archipelago, has won a three-year, roughly $1.26 million federal contract to help clear a backlog of medical billing for the Indian Health Service — work performed in Oklahoma City, not Alaska.

The contract went to Koniag Advisory and Business Solutions, part of Koniag Government Services, the federal-contracting arm of Koniag, Inc. Two regions of the Indian Health Service have fallen behind on coding and billing patient visits, and the contract funds a team to work through that backlog — work the agency calls essential to keeping operations running. The obligated amount is about $1.26 million; with all options exercised, the order could be worth about $4.25 million. It draws on a larger agreement, worth up to $24.5 million, that the health service awarded the same Koniag subsidiary last year through the federal 8(a) program for disadvantaged small businesses.

That kind of federal work is central to how Koniag operates — and, in turn, to what it returns to its Alutiiq shareholders. Koniag is one of the twelve regional corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, representing about 4,300 Alutiiq shareholders whose ancestral home is Kodiak Island and the surrounding archipelago. It has grown into one of Alaska's largest companies, and the great majority of its revenue comes from its operating businesses, government-services contracting chief among them.

The return on that business flows back to Kodiak. In a recent year, Koniag distributed some $25 million in shareholder benefits — regular dividends, along with elder benefits for shareholders 62 and older, care packages of canned salmon delivered to hundreds of elders, and college scholarships awarded through the corporation's education foundation, which has given more than $6 million to Alutiiq students over its history. A federal billing contract in Oklahoma City is one small part of the business that pays for all of it.

The federal records do not define which two health-service regions are behind, or how large the backlog is, and neither the agency nor the company appears in them.