noncompetitive | The Contracting Education Academy

August 20, 2015 By AMK

Incomplete contractor info made it difficult for DoD to determine noncompetitive contract prices

The Defense Department had trouble determining reasonable prices for noncompetitive contracts because some contractors wouldn’t share pricing information, according to an Aug. 12 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

Normally, DoD relies on competition to ensure that it pays a reasonable price for its goods and services. But for noncompetitive contracts, DoD relies on other methods including information from previous contracts or from the contractors themselves, GAO says in the report.

The DoD requested pricing information from contractors for 12 of 32 noncompetitive agreements in GAO’s sample. For the remaning 20 contracts, DoD felt it already had enough information to make sure it was getting a reasonable price.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernment.com/story/incomplete-contractor-info-made-it-difficult-dod-determine-noncompetitive-c/2015-08-13

February 4, 2015 By AMK

IG: Navy and Marine Corps reasonably justified IT contracts with little or no competition

The Navy and Marine Corps reasonably justified about $220 million worth of IT contracts that were solicited without full and open competition, says the Defense Department’s inspector general in a report issued Jan. 23.

The IG reviewed 66 Navy and Marine Corps IT contracts that used “other than full and open competition” to procure technology services, with 34 being sole-source contracts and the other 32 limiting competition in some way.

The 34 sole-source contracts were valued at $151.5 million, with the rest coming in around $70 million, the report says.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/ig-navy-and-marine-corps-justified-it-contracts-little-or-no-competition/2015-01-26

May 6, 2014 By AMK

‘Catastrophic’ network outage sets stage for ‘exception to fair opportunity’

The agency that manages the Pentagon Police Department and also runs networks and computers used the by the Office of the Secretary of Defense experienced a “catastrophic network technological outage” on Jan. 3, and it could take until January 2015 to complete the repairs, an obscure document on the Federal Business Opportunities website revealed.

That document, posted on May 2, disclosed that the outage experienced by the Pentagon Life Safety System Network and Life Safety Backbone left the Pentagon Force Protection Agency “without access to the mission-critical systems needed to properly safeguard personnel and facilities, rendering the agency blind across the national capital region.”

The Force Protection Agency provides security and services to 100 military buildings in Washington, Maryland and Virginia.

The agency estimated it would take six to 12 months to “effect repairs and to upgrade the network core to mitigate future outage risks.” Repairs include recovery of data after the catastrophic network technological outage and upgrade and replacement of switches and routers.

SRA International Inc. won a $56 million contract for the Life Safety System Network in 2008 that expired on April 30. The Force Protection Agency falls under the Washington Headquarters Service, which extended the SRA contract through Oct. 31, with a value of $7.3 million, and a four month option through Feb. 28, 2015, with a total value of $11.4 million.

See the current posting on FedBizOpps at https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=7a4521d43f5f5c78b19eab99bed941ea&_cview=0.

Keep reading this article at http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2014/05/pentagon-police-agency-hit-catastrophic-network-outage/83842.

April 23, 2014 By AMK

About 40 percent of DoD contracts in fiscal 2013 were noncompetitive

About 40 percent of all contracts awarded by the Defense Department in fiscal 2013 were through noncompetitive awards, says an April 16 Government Accountability Office report.

When justifying why there was no competition, the DoD tends to bundle contracts together and apply a class justifcation rather than going contract-by-contract, the report says.

Under the Federal Acquisition Regulation (6.303-1), noncompetitive contracts must be supported by justifications that address the specific exception to the open competition requirement. Those justifications may cover an individual contact or multiple contracts under a class justification.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernment.com/story/about-40-percent-dod-contracts-fiscal-2013-were-noncompetitive/2014-04-17

October 3, 2013 By AMK

How agencies bury noncompetitive procurements

I get a daily FedBizOpps feed of widget and gadget procurements and awards, and have spent literally hours the past two days poring through year-end sole source contract awards.

These are taxpayer dollars expended in an end-of-fiscal-year “use it or lose it” frenzy, but eyeballing these sole source awards is a manual process that requires opening multiple windows to divine what agencies bought and how much they spent.

In many cases agencies don’t disclose what they spent on the sole source contracts, which raises my reporter antenna.

The justification for these non-competitive awards all contain standard boiler plate language — only Vendor X can supply the gadget, software or service and if the contract is not extended or the gizmo acquired, vital operations will cease, often with a threat to national security.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/defense/whats-brewin/2013/09/how-agencies-bury-noncompetitive-contracts/70834

The Defense Department had trouble determining reasonable prices for noncompetitive contracts because some contractors wouldn’t share pricing information, according to an Aug. 12 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

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