audit | The Contracting Education Academy

October 22, 2018 By AMK

Defense acquisition workers seeing a new era in training

The Defense acquisition workforce may see a new era in training, recruiting and retainment as the Pentagon and military services change the way they view the value of their employees.

Both the Army and the Defense Department are making changes in how they evaluate and prioritize the experience and education of the acquisition workforce.

The Army recently released a directive focused on acquisition talent management.

“We want our people to have an appropriate set of experiences,” acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said of the directive during a speech this week at an Association of the United States Army conference in Washington. “We want our program managers and officers to have fellowships with industry, masters degrees within certain disciplines. It’s also about the tenures for people in program management. We’re looking at tours of three-to-four years, so more continuity and the right set of experiences so that they have a broader perspective than the ones we’ve had previously.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2017/10/defense-acquisition-workers-seeing-a-new-era-in-training/

August 22, 2018 By AMK

Pentagon’s contracting gurus mismanaged their own contracts

The Pentagon’s contracting gurus repeatedly made massive, preventable mistakes while managing contracts for a critical software project of their own, violating federal budget law along the way, according to scathing internal reports and other records obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).

Ironically, the purpose of the mismanaged system is to help manage the rest of the Pentagon’s contracts.

The Pentagon relies on the obscure Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) to negotiate and administer $5 trillion in contracts across the Defense Department as an average of $455 million in taxpayer dollars are paid out each day to contractors. How well that agency does its job directly affects both how wisely taxpayer dollars are spent and whether our troops get what they need when they need it. Yet the cascading series of major, systemic failures within the agency, which has nearly 12,000 employees and an annual budget of roughly $1.5 billion, led an independent investigator from the Army to go so far as to recommend that it be prohibited from awarding its own contracts in the future.

Documents obtained by POGO — including a September 2017 preliminary investigative report, an April 2018 internal memo, and a draft of the final report from this summer — show that over the course of several years, the agency mismanaged contracts for the software project. The agency spent far more than it was authorized to spend, violated numerous policies and regulations, and received insufficient oversight from the Pentagon. When these documents are viewed alongside Defense Department watchdog findings from recent years, there appears to be an agency-wide pattern of failing to adequately support the Pentagon’s procurement efforts and sufficiently protect the taxpayer — the agency’s very mission.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.pogo.org/our-work/articles/2018/pentagons-contracting-gurus-mismanaged-their-own-contracts.html

July 3, 2018 By AMK

To streamline acquisitions, 809 Panel presses DoD to adopt portfolio management

The congressionally-mandated panel in charge of finding ways to streamline the Defense acquisition system called last Thursday for dramatic changes in how the Defense Department organizes itself to define requirements for weapons systems and manage its procurement budgets, saying DoD must move to a “portfolio-centric” approach to procuring military equipment.

In the second volume of its report to Congress, the Section 809 Panel said the Pentagon’s current decision making and incentive structures are far too focused on individual weapons programs, not on broader portfolios of capabilities.

In a related problem, the panel said the three broader communities within DoD that are in charge of deciding what to buy, prioritizing funding for those systems, and actually conducting procurements, are too siloed to make the sorts of quick, agile decisions needed to deliver military capabilities that are relevant to the modern battlefield.

“The highly centralized management framework of each support system fosters inconsistent accountability and responsibility,” the panel wrote. “Decision-making processes that focus on individual programs instead of enterprise capabilities as a whole cultivate a system bereft of flexibility, speed, and innovation.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/defense-main/2018/06/to-streamline-acquisitions-809-panel-presses-dod-to-adopt-porfolio-management/

March 23, 2018 By AMK

Pentagon managers defend $1 billion price tag of largest audit ever

The top financial managers at Pentagon this week assured senators that the nearly $1 billion audit now underway at the Defense department will be worth the price.

Defense Undersecretary and Comptroller David Norquist—under questioning by Senate Budget Committee members seeking efficiencies and defense budget reforms—said the price of $367 million in contract audit costs just in fiscal 2018 is about 1/30th of 1 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. That is “less than what Fortune 100 companies such as General Electric, Proctor & Gamble and International Business Machines Corp. pay their auditors,” he said.

“I anticipate the audit process will uncover many places where our controls or processes are broken,” he told the committee. “There will be unpleasant surprises. Some of these problems may also prove frustratingly difficult to fix. But the alternative is to operate in ignorance of the challenge and miss the opportunity to reform.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/defense/2018/03/pentagon-managers-defend-1-billion-price-tag-largest-audit-ever/146549

February 15, 2018 By AMK

Here are highlights from DoD acquisition panel’s 1st report

In 2016, Congress instructed the U.S. Department of Defense to convene a panel of procurement professionals from government and industry to review the regulations governing DoD procurements. The “Section 809 panel” was instructed to recommend “amendment or repeal” of defense procurement regulations “with a view toward streamlining and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the defense acquisition process and maintaining defense technology advantage.”

On Jan. 31, 2018, the 809 panel issued the first volume of its much-anticipated final report, setting forth 73 discrete recommendations to Congress for procurement reform. Volume two of the report is due in June of 2018, and volume three is due in January of 2019. This first volume addresses, among other topics:

Commercial buying;
Contract compliance and audit; and
Small business goals.

Weighing in at nearly 650 pages, the report has a lot to offer, and in places proceeds well beyond the limited remit of “amendment or repeal” of existing regulations, proposing major reforms and revisions that would require significant new law and rulemaking to implement. The law that established the 809 panel did not require Congress or the DoD to adopt its recommendations, but the full three-volume report represents an attempt to define the terms of the debate over procurement reform, and is intended to feed into Congress’ deliberations over the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act. This article aims to give a brief summary of the report’s tone and contents.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=670692

The Defense acquisition workforce may see a new era in training, recruiting and retainment as the Pentagon and military services change the way they view the value of their employees.

The top financial managers at Pentagon this week assured senators that the nearly $1 billion audit now underway at the Defense department will be worth the price.

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