Although the General Services Administration (GSA) has human capital plans for its acquisition workforce, the agency’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) does not have a comprehensive human capital plan to address hiring, retention, and succession planning for its contract specialist workforce.
Without such a plan, FAS may be hiring contract specialists without assessing needs and hiring costs, considering turnover rates, and preparing for upcoming retirements.
Those are the findings of GSA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in a report released on July 22, 2016.
The OIG recommends that the FAS Commissioner:
1. Develop and implement a comprehensive human capital plan that addresses the hiring, retention, and succession planning of FAS’s contract specialist workforce.
2. Evaluate and update the comprehensive human capital plan on an annual basis.
Specifically noted in the OIG’s report is the fact that “30 percent of [the FAS] contract specialist workforce [is} eligible to retire within the next 5 years.” The “human capital plan” that OIG calls for “should be designed to ensure FAS evaluates hiring costs across its regions, reduces turnover, and prepares for upcoming retirements for its contract specialist workforce.”
In responding to the audit report, FAS Commissioner Thomas Sharpe, Jr. states that FAS is “officially in compliance with the relevant acquisition workforce mandates.” However, based on a draft of the OIG’s report provided earlier, Sharpe notes that FAS “is already in the process of developing the content to feed the corrective action plan.”
