The Government Accountability Office on March 9 upheld a protest challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s multimillion-dollar contract with CACI to integrate financial management systems. CACI was awarded up to $450 million worth of work on Nov. 19 to support the department’s troubled Transformation and Systems Consolidation program, which required the company to consolidate financial, acquisition and asset management systems across the department. Competitors – Global Computer Enterprises and Savantage Financial Services – protested the award with GAO about a week later. GAO upheld GCE’s protest but dismissed Savantage’s, according to a GAO decision released Wednesday. GCE argued that DHS…
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The National Federation of Federal Employees says federal passport specialists are overworked and often don’t have time to thoroughly review passport applications. This burden may be responsible for the State Department’s failure to identify five of seven fraudulent passport applications the Government Accountability Office submitted in a covert operation, the union argued in a press release today. Passport agency workers have to meet productivity quotas and “failing to meet these numbers in the interest of carefully reviewing citizenship documents could lead to termination,” according to the NFFE. Passport specialists were unable to provide input when higher-ups were formulating the quotas,…
The Government Accountability Office will report on the General Services Administration’s management of its supply schedules in the spring,said John Needham, a director of acquisition and sourcing management for the watchdog agency. The report will look at whether GSA’s reorganization improved management of the Multiple Award Schedules program and the effectiveness of the management tools GSA has in place, he said. Mismanagement of the schedules program led to a series of contracting scandals five years ago. The scandals prompted GAO to add interagency contracts to its High Risk List. In addition, the report will address concerns raised by the congressionally…
Agency use of risky cost-based contracts has dropped over the last six-years, but the number of contracts coded as “combination contracts” is on the rise, the Government Accountability Office found in a report released today. Between 2003 and 2008, the value of cost-reimbursement contracts, which pay vendors for their actual costs to perform the work, grew from $120 billion to $136 billion. But as a percentage of overall dollars spent through the procurement process, use declined. In 2003, the $120 billion represented 34 percent of the $298 billion spent. In 2008, the $136 billion was just 26 percent of the…
Earlier today I previewed reports the Government Accountability Office and the Defense Department Inspector General will release tomorrow highlighting the depth of auditing problems at the Defense Contract Audit Agency. But these watchdogs are not the only ones with concerns about DCAA’s audit management. The Wartime Contracting Commission — a bipartisan, congressionally chartered panel tasked with making recommendations to improve contingency contracting — released this report today calling on DCAA to abandon the all-or-nothing approach it takes when rendering opinions on contractor business systems. In December, DCAA scrapped its opinion that allowed business systems with minor deficiencies to be deemed…
The U.S. Postal Service wants to study roughly 1,000 post offices for possible closure – the latest cost-cutting step from an agency that is scrambling to deal with a projected $7 billion deficit this year and larger losses in 2010. The agency started its review earlier this year with approximately 3,200 post offices, and decided about 1,000 of them are “candidates for further review.” Postal managers say they will consider several factors in deciding whether to close those facilities: mail volume, proximity to other post offices, and the potential savings in labor and utility costs. Post offices only generate about…
Update, 11:43 a.m.: Here’s a slightly eye-popping statistic from the GAO report: The Postal Service is projecting a $7 billion loss in FY2010 (next year) — even after reducing its expenses by $8 billion. Put another way, there is a $15 billion gap between the Postal Service’s projected FY2010 revenues and its current expenses. Update, 11:37 a.m.: That was quick. Here’s GAO’s report (pdf) about why the Postal Service is on the list. Update, 11:25 a.m.: Here’s a link to GAO’s current 2009 high-risk list (pdf). The list was started in 1990 and is updated biennially; it documents agencies that…
The Government Accountability Office wants you to interact with the agency online through its Twitter feed and YouTube page. The GAO joins more than 50 federal agencies plus dozens of members of Congress in reaching out to the public through Twitter, though the GAO has a way to go to adopt the casual, abbreviated style of writing prominent on Twitter. Its most recent Twitter post may not be scintillating enough to draw many new users into GAO reports: GAO-09-567, Tax Administration: IRS Should Evaluate Penalties and Develop a Plan to Focus Its Effort” The GAO maintains two Twitter accounts, one…
The House Appropriations Committee approved the Homeland Security and Legislative Branch fiscal year 2010 appropriations draft bills at a markup Friday. The Homeland Security bill provides $42.63 billion for the agency, compared to President Barack Obama’s $42.83 billion request for fiscal year 2010. In 2009, the agency received $39.98 billion. The bill cuts $135 million requested for agency operations due to “staffing vacancies, redundant policy initiatives and poorly justified request to consolidate DHS headquarters for those agencies not moving to St. Elizabeths,” according to a committee news release. The bill includes: $10 billion for Customs and Border Protection, $82 million…
A lot has been made about the 17 percent up-tick in protests handled by the Government Accountability Office last year, but today GAO released a long-awaited trend report that shows, historically speaking, protest levels are relatively low. GAO first got the protest authorities we know today in 1984. Since then the number of protests it handles have dropped significantly from 2,240 in 1989 to 1,027 last year. But protests have been inching up since 2001, mirroring the rise in procurement spending, according to the report. Last year’s rise is primarily due to GAO’s expanded authority to handle protests of task orders…