June 19 (Bloomberg) -- A contractor the Obama administrationhired to monitor progress on its health insurance website, HealthCare.gov, repeatedlywarned the project was falling behind before the site failed inOctober, Senate Republicans said in a report.

The contractor, TurningPoint Global Solutions, “raised a litanyof red flags” about the project in audits for the governmentbeginning about a year before the website opened Oct. 1, accordingto the report by two Republican senators, Orrin Hatch of Utah andCharles Grassley of Iowa. A month before the site went live, thecontractor said that of 355,000 lines of code, 21,000 haddefects.

Many of the failures of healthcare.gov, the federal insurancemarketplace that served 34 states in the first year of the PatientProtection and Affordable Care Act, have been previouslydocumented. Programming and hardware errors prevented the site fromworking for most Americans until December, and the former Healthand Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, publiclyacknowledged the project was a "debacle.’’ Sheresigned April 10.