reporting requirements | The Contracting Education Academy

November 18, 2013 By AMK

VA contracts with non-VA medical providers lacked performance requirements, GAO says

Some Veterans Affairs Department contracts with non-VA medical providers didn’t contain specific performance requirements and contracting officer representatives didn’t have time to monitor the contracts due to other duties, an Oct. 31 Government Accountability Office report says.

Of the 12 contracts GAO reviewed from the four VA medical centers, 10 lacked specific performance requirements in one or more of six categories: type of provider or care; credentialing and privileging; clinical practice standards; medical record documentation; business processes; and access to care.

In one case, a VA medical center cardiothoracic contract didn’t contain a statement describing the contract provider’s responsibilities for reporting and responding to adverse events and patient complaints.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernment.com/story/va-contracts-non-va-medical-providers-lacked-performance-requirements-gao-s/2013-11-05

Download a copy of the GAO report at: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/658685.pdf

October 8, 2012 By AMK

Agencies should file better reports on their service contracts, GAO says

The Obama administration’s effort to better calibrate which functions are inherently governmental and which are better contracted out will require improvements in agency inventories of service contracts, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

Forty eight of the 49 agencies that GAO reviewed had filed the required lists of their contracts for such services as professional management support, information technology support and medical support, which together totaled $126 billion in fiscal 2011. But due to differing methodologies among agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and Congress could not “meaningfully use these service contract inventories to compare service contract obligations among agencies or develop spending trends,” the report said, adding, “agencies did not have a complete universe of service contracts to consider for review.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2012/09/agencies-should-file-better-reports-their-service-contracts-gao-says/58451/?oref=govexec_today_nl

June 13, 2011 By AMK

OFPP adds FPDS reporting requirements

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy published an all-too–familiar memo May 31, pushing agencies to ensure that the data reported in the Federal Procurement Data System is complete and accurate.

A Federal Acquisition Regulation rule requiring chief acquisition officers to certify that their previous fiscal year’s entries into FPDS are correct in a January report to OFPP, will now be augmented by a new rule, outlined in Administrator Dan Gordon’s memo (.pdf).

Come January, agencies will also be required to submit any acquisition-related updates to their agency’s general data quality plans to the Office of Management and Budget, through the OMB MAX community website.

“These updates should include, at a minimum, the steps agencies are taking to improve past performance reporting, in accordance with OFPP’s January 2011 memorandum,” wrote Gordon, “and other efforts to improve the quality of acquisition-related data and information.”

While the memo does not change the metrics for FPDS entry, it does provide standardized reporting templates and suggest sampling methodologies. Gordon asked agencies to stand up policies and internal controls to monitor procurement data quality and implement compliance controls for contractors. The memo also emphasized training, saying that OFPP will work with the Federal Acquisition Institute and Defense Acquisition University.

While FPDS has improved over the last several years, it hasn’t improved significantly, said Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer at McLean, Va.-based FedSources, which was recently acquired by Deltek.

“It takes a lot of effort to make every one of the 3 million to 7 million contract actions as perfect as they can possibly be,” said Bjorklund. “It’s a lot of humans.”

There’s no reliable, automated way to take contract actions and transfer that information to FPDS–especially when considering the subjectivity that comes with product service coding.

“There aren’t enough checks and balances. It would be great if there was some decision support system that would help all these agencies really report the data very accurately and very completely, but it doesn’t exist and it would be very expensive to develop a decision report system like that,” said Bjorklund.

— by mbernhart – Fierce Government – June 7, 2011 – 7:04am at http://www.fiercegovernment.com/story/ofpp-adds-fpds-reporting-requirements/2011-06-07

For more:
– see the OFPP memo (.pdf)

March 7, 2011 By AMK

Agencies must report plans for reducing paperwork burden on small businesses

The Office of Management and Budget last week ordered federal agencies to reduce the paperwork burden and reporting requirements for small businesses.

The White House estimates the public spent 9.8 billion hours responding to federal reporting requirements in 2009, 85 million hours more than in 2008 and 2.9 billion hours more than in 1995, when Congress passed the Paperwork Reduction Act, which sought to reduce the burden on the public.

Some agencies already have made substantial progress. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission took steps to trim reporting requirements 27 percent from 2008 to 2009; the Social Security Administration produced a 13 percent decrease, OMB said.

“Although these developments are encouraging, more should be done,” OMB’s Cass Sunstein, administrator for information and regulatory affairs, wrote in the directive to agency chief information officers. “To that end, this memorandum asks agencies to produce one or more burden reduction initiatives that promise to produce significant progress in the next year.” CIOs must respond by April 22.

The request is part of OMB’s annual call for agencies to outline progress made on paperwork reduction initiatives. This year, the White House asked agencies to give priority to initiatives that provide relief to small businesses or recipients of federal benefits. “Because of economics of scale, a collection may be proportionally more burdensome for a small entity than a large one,” the memo said.

OMB spokeswoman Meg Reilly said the emphasis on small businesses is consistent with a Jan. 18 presidential memorandum andexecutive order on regulatory flexibility, small business and job creation. The OMB memo “supplements and builds upon these efforts to reduce burdens on small businesses and the American public,” she wrote in an e-mail.

To help reduce the burden on small businesses, OMB suggested agencies use electronic forms, reduce the frequency of collecting information, and share and reuse existing data.

“We expect agencies to develop their own unique burden reduction initiatives, in addition to those that fit into the categories we requested,” Reilly said.

While the effort should help cut paperwork, she said, “over 40 percent of the increase in burden from 2000 to 2009 can be attributed to new congressional statutes.”

Rick Melberth, director of regulatory policy for the government accountability group OMB Watch, applauded the suggestions. “In terms of burden on small business, it means that there may be some time savings in not filling in [the same] information [many times],” he said. “You fill it in one time; the agency has it, so it saves time there.”

Search this Website