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December 16, 2020 By cs

GAO: Agencies should assess contracting workforce needs and purchase card fraud risk

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently examined how federal agencies use contracts and purchase cards to acquire goods and services to get urgently needed items after a disaster.

Specifically, GAO assessed selected agencies’ planning for contracting workforce needs and purchase card fraud risks related to disaster response.

Overall, here’s what they found:

Not all agencies planned for or assessed their contracting workforce needs for disaster response.
Only 1 of the 6 agencies assessed how purchase card fraud risks change during disaster response.

Contracting Workforce

The efforts of selected agencies to plan for disaster contracting activities and assess contracting workforce needs varied. The U.S. Forest Service initiated efforts to address its disaster response contracting workforce needs while three agencies — the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), the U.S. Coast Guard, and Department of the Interior (DOI) — partially addressed these needs. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) indicated it did not have concerns fulfilling its disaster contracting responsibilities.

Within three agencies examined, GAO found the following:

USACE assigned clear roles and responsibilities for disaster response contracting activities, but has not formally assessed its contracting workforce to determine if it can fulfill these roles.
The Coast Guard has a process to assess its workforce needs, but it does not account for contracting for disaster response activities.
DOI is developing a strategic acquisition plan and additional guidance for its bureaus on how to structure their contracting functions, but currently does not account for disaster contracting responsibilities.

Contracting officials at all three of these agencies identified challenges executing their regular responsibilities along with their disaster-related responsibilities during the 2017 and 2018 hurricane and wildfire seasons. For example, Coast Guard contracting officials stated they have fallen increasingly behind since 2017 and that future disaster response missions would not be sustainable with their current workforce.

GAO’s strategic workforce planning principles call for agencies to determine the critical skills and competencies needed to achieve future programmatic results. Without accounting for disaster response contracting activities in workforce planning, these agencies are missing opportunities to ensure their contracting workforces are equipped to respond to future disasters.

Purchase Cards

Among the five agencies GAO reviewed, plus the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), more than $20 million was collectively spent for 2017 and 2018 disaster response activities using purchase cards. GAO found that two of these six agencies — Forest Service and EPA — have not completed fraud risk profiles for their purchase card programs that align with leading practices in GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework. Additionally, five of the six agencies have not assessed or documented how their fraud risk for purchase card use might differ in a disaster response environment. DOI completed such an assessment during the course of our review.

An OMB memorandum requires agencies to complete risk profiles for their purchase card programs that include fraud risk. GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework states managers should assess fraud risk regularly and document those assessments in risk profiles. The framework also states that risk profiles may differ in the context of disaster response when managers may have a higher fraud risk tolerance since individuals in these environments have an urgent need for products and services. Without assessing fraud risk for purchase card programs or how risk may change in a disaster response environment, agencies may not design or implement effective internal controls, such as search criteria to identify fraudulent transactions.

Recommendations

As a result of its review, GAO made a total of 12 recommendations which address the need for three agencies to assess disaster response contracting needs as a part of overall workforce planning, and for five agencies to assess fraud risk for purchase card use in support of disaster response. GAO’s complete report can be found here: https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-21-42#summary.

October 30, 2020 By cs

GAO: DHS chief acquisition officer must improve vetting of components’ procurement executives

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report stating that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) chief acquisition officer needs to improve the assessment of DHS units’ component acquisition executives (CAE).

In its report, GAO says that the DHS chief acquisition officer selects CAEs that handle DHS components’ acquisition-related policies, workforce, data collection and reporting functions.

Components such as the U.S. Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have implemented CAE vetting procedures, according to GAO.

However, the watchdog said that four out of five CAEs in the DHS Management Directorate, including three acting CAEs, “have not been subjected to this process.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.executivegov.com/2020/10/gao-dhs-chief-acquisition-officer-must-improve-vetting-of-components-procurement-executives/

June 4, 2019 By AMK

Can contracts be awarded without pricing?

Since the enactment of the Competition in Contracting Act in 1984, price has been an essential element of every contract awarded by the Federal Government under the Federal Acquisition Regulation, along with technical capability and (more recently) past performance. In addition, before making an award, every contracting officer must determine that the price offered by the winning offeror(s) is “fair and reasonable.”

Agencies have wide discretion in establishing the value of the factors and subfactors under each of these three elements, and frequently price is identified as the least important of the factors to be evaluated.

But what if the price on a solicitation was not a factor to be evaluated at all? As part of the Professional Services Council’s long-standing acquisition reform advocacy agenda, we supported just such an experiment and it is now in effect for some agencies.

In Section 825 of the Fiscal Year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress provided that, for multiple-award indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) contracts, DoD, NASA and Coast Guard buying activities are not required to evaluate cost or price during the evaluation of the formation of the ID/IQ contract, provided other conditions are met. If cost or price is not evaluated at formation, however, cost or price must be an evaluation factor in conjunction with the issuance of any task or delivery order under such awarded contract. The Professional Services Council strongly supported that legislative proposal.

What all of these ID/IQ solicitations and resulting contracts have in common is that there is actually no work associated with the formation of the base contract. All of the actual work is solicited under task or delivery orders issued once the base contract is in place. As such, we argued that agencies were creating irrelevant price evaluation factors in order to comply with the then-existing statutory requirement to evaluate price at contract formation, and agencies were not making true comparative evaluations of offerors’ pricing since there was no factual basis for doing so. And it didn’t matter whether the ID/IQ contract provided for fixed prices, labor hour pricing, or hybrid pricing.

Keep reading article at: https://www.pscouncil.org/a/Content/2019/Can_Contracts_Be_Awarded_Without_Pricing.aspx

May 9, 2019 By AMK

FEMA showed weak mastery of contracts during hurricane response and recovery

Four agencies providing disaster relief following the triple hurricanes and California wildfires of 2017 failed to keep proper records of contracts with suppliers, rendering it impractical for the Government Accountability Office to fully track $5 billion in spending.

GAO’s report released on Wednesday examined 23 sample contracts let after the disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard and the Defense Logistics Agency. Its conclusion: the full extent of contracting related to the 2017 disasters is unknown due to Homeland Security Department’s irregular schedule for closing contracts and inconsistent use of standard contracting codes.

Disaster relief contracts for everything from ready-made meals to tarpaulins can be awarded prospectively—before anyone knows the date of a coming act of God—or after the storm or fire has rendered thousands homeless or living in damaged property.

But among the contracts studied as of June 30, 2018—following a record-setting displacement of 15 percent of the U.S. population from several natural events—GAO reviewed the three-fourths of the obligations that were let by FEMA and the Army engineers and found that the Homeland Security Department violated procedure with early closures of what are called national interest action codes. Those numbered codes, administered by the General Services Administration, allow agencies to track data on contract actions related to national emergencies, and are available on the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation to provide governmentwide insight into response and recovery efforts.

Keep reading article at: https://www.govexec.com/contracting/2019/04/fema-showed-weak-mastery-contracts-during-hurricane-response-and-recovery/156541/

May 11, 2018 By AMK

FAR rule implements higher dollar threshold for GAO’s protest jurisdiction over DoD, NASA, Coast Guard task orders

In a new rule announced May 1, the FAR Council implemented prior statutory changes to GAO’s bid protest jurisdiction.

For task orders issued by the Department of Defense, NASA, or the Coast Guard, the rule provides that GAO will have jurisdiction only over task orders “valued in excess of $25 million.”

For civilian agencies, GAO continues to have jurisdiction over protests of task orders “valued in excess of $10 million.” The rule also permanently repeals a pre-existing FAR clause that had set a September 30, 2016 expiration date on the ability to protest civilian agency task orders.

The new rule — codified as FAR 16.505(a)(10) — implements Section 835 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, which directed the FAR Council to establish the new DoD, NASA, and Coast Guard threshold. (The sunset date for protests of civilian agency task orders had previously been repealed by the GAO Civilian Task and Delivery Order Protest Authority Act of 2016.) According to the FAR Council, its new rule is designed to “follow[] the statute exactly.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.insidegovernmentcontracts.com/2018/05/new-far-rule-implements-increased-minimum-dollar-threshold-for-gaos-protest-jurisdiction-over-dod-nasa-and-coast-guard-task-orders/