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Feds spend billions on COVID-19 contracts, often without fully competitive bidding

When nurses and doctors across the country were struggling to treat coronavirus patients without enough protective gear, and the federal government was scrambling to find those supplies, Quedon Baul saw an opportunity.

His three-person company in McKinney, Texas, distributes medical supplies but didn’t have much experience with face shields.  Still, he landed two government contracts worth up to $20 million to deliver the personal protective equipment.  He couldn’t meet the first deadline, so he found subcontractors to do the job.

“You get an opportunity, you take it,” Baul says. “It wasn’t my first rodeo, but it’s certainly my first big rodeo.”

The U.S. government has granted contracts worth as much as $25 billion as it races to address the COVID-19 public health crisis.  NPR reviewed a database of thousands of contracting actions and found more than 250 companies that got contracts worth more than $1 million without going through a fully competitive bidding process.

Some of the companies, such as Baul’s, had little or no experience with personal protective equipment.  Others had never worked in the medical field at all.  Contractors also included a company that imported vodka and a school security consultant.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/09/869052415/feds-spend-billions-on-covid-19-contracts-often-without-fully-competitive-biddin

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech has established a webpage where all contract-related developments related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) are summarized.  Find the page at: https://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/coronavirus-information-for-contracting-officers-and-contractors/

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Overstock.com protest could delay GSA commercial e-marketplace pilots until April or beyond

The General Services Administration (GSA) recently responded to an Overstock.com protest of the agency’s commercial e-marketplace solicitation, which could delay pilots until April — assuming revisions aren’t ordered.

Overstock filed its pre-award bid protest with the Government Accountability Office on Jan. 15 arguing some of the solicitation’s terms are ambiguous and restrict competition. The internet retailer further argued GSA didn’t allow sufficient time for companies to respond, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

Overstock had until Feb. 24 to respond to GSA’s agency report based on anything it learns. The protest itself is covered by a protective order limiting disclosure to lawyers for the private parties.

Section 846 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act directed GSA to work with nontraditional government contractors on allowing agencies to purchase up to $250,000 — the simplified acquisition threshold — in commercial items. GSA’s initial pilot will focus on e-marketplaces like Amazon or Overstock, where competition between sellers occurs at the item level.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/overstock-gsa-e-marketplace-protest/

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How contracting officers want to use the new micropurchase threshold

Steve Kelman’s recent talk with feds reinforced his view that a $10,000 micropurchase limit opens up vast new acquisition possibilities.

Recently I did a webinar at the request of the General Services Administration’s Acquisition Gateway for professional services, as part of their Spotlight training series, on the new micropurchase threshold.  As I have blogged before, the threshold has been raised to $10,000 for civilian agencies and, through a strange anomaly that hopefully will be corrected soon, to $6,000 for the Department of Defense.

This change will allow agencies to make procurements of up to $10,000 without (if they choose) competitively soliciting or evaluating proposals, though some of the agencies that have started using the authority have chosen to develop one-page requirements statements and solicit one-page competitive proposal. Regulations implementing this change are unfortunately not out yet, but a number of agencies — including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security and GSA itself — have received class deviations to introduce the change now. However, the GSA class deviation applies only to GSA’s own purchases, not more broadly for any purchases using GSA vehicles.

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2018/11/kelman-micropurchase-ideas.aspx

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DoD raises micro-purchase threshold to $5,000

The Department of Defense (DoD) has issued a class deviation that raises the micro-purchase threshold from $3,500 to $5,000.

Class Deviation 2017-O0006, issued July 13, 2017 and effective immediately, allows authorized DoD buyers to make purchases of supplies and services up to $5,000 using streamlined procedures.  Micro-purchases are primarily made through the use of Governmentwide purchase cards (GPC).

According to FAR 13,203, micro-purchases may be awarded without soliciting competitive quotations if the contracting officer or other authorized official considers the price to be reasonable.

The class deviation also raised the micro-purchase threshold to $10,000 for DoD’s basic research programs and for activities of DoD’s science and technology reinvention laboratories.

It is expected that these new purchasing thresholds will be incorporated into the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation (DFARS) in the near future.

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Whistleblower alleges culture of intimidation at DCAA

J. Kirk McGill was a Senior Auditor at the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the agency responsible for auditing the Department of Defense’s (DoD) contract expenditures. He is also a whistleblower whose disclosures to Congress have resulted in multiple Congressional hearings, the termination of a nonprofit from grants worth over $400 million, and the closure of a loophole in contracting policy for nonprofit grantees.

Importantly, his case also sets a precedent for federal whistleblowers to engage in whistleblowing activities while on official time. None of this was easy, and it came—as is too often the case for whistleblowers—at a personal cost to McGill.

In 2013, McGill and his DCAA team were loaned out to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Inspector General (IG) to conduct a follow-up audit of the $433 million construction grant NSF had awarded for a project called the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The project was not competitively bid, and despite an earlier DCAA audit finding serious problems with the initial proposal, NSF awarded it to a nonprofit organization called NEON, Inc.—a nonprofit focused solely on the project.

McGill, who was the Auditor-in-Charge, and his team found that NEON, Inc.’s accounting system was seriously flawed and lacked important supporting documentation. The audit also found poor budget controls that meant the project managers wouldn’t know if the program ran over budget—even tens of millions of dollars over budget—until it was too late to prevent. (The NSF later admitted that the project had run $80 million over budget.) As concerning as those numbers are, the audit also found that NEON, Inc. was abusing a $1.8 million category of funds called “management fees,” which were being used to pay for unallowable costs like alcohol, lobbying, and a lavish holiday party. McGill reported two instances of suspected fraud to the NSF IG through the normal channels. The IG investigated and referred the cases to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for potential prosecution, but DOJ declined to pursue them [p.3].

When McGill examined the requirements of reporting suspected fraud in an audit report, he found himself trapped.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.pogo.org/blog/2016/10/whistleblower-alleges-culture-of-intimidation-at-dcaa.html

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