Lawmakers and the defense industry are clashing over the handling of company information in databases the Pentagon refers to when making contract decisions.
The use of such data repositories has come under fire this year. The Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy in a January memo called for improving the quantity and quality of company data in them so “source-selection officials have greater confidence in the reliability and relevance of the information there.”
The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) highlights these and other concerns regarding past-performance databases in its report on the fiscal year 2012 defense authorization bill, which the Senate is expected to debate in September.
The SASC wants to require the Pentagon acquisition chief to craft a strategy “for ensuring that timely, accurate, and complete information on contractor performance is included in past-performance databases used for making source selection decisions.”
Some in industry are concerned because the SASC’s version of the bill calls for adding government evaluations of contractor performance to the databases immediately after they are completed–instead of after a period of contractor comment, rebuttal, and challenge, as is done under current federal-acquisition regulations. The legislation, which calls for the Pentagon acquisition chief to revise the regulations, would allow contractors to “submit comments, rebutting statements, or additional information pertaining to such agency evaluations for inclusion in such database.”
The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) finds the SASC’s proposed change “problematic,” because it would not allow for companies to prevent the inclusion of any incorrect data, said Cord Sterling, the defense industry trade group’s vice president for legislative affairs.
AIA believes the contractors’ past-performance data shouldn’t “automatically go into the database until you’ve gone through and due process and determined whether or not it is a problem,” Sterling said in an interview.
“You shouldn’t be guilty by allegation,” he added. “If somebody says you’ve got a past-performance problem and the company disagrees, the company should be able to stand up and say, ‘Wait a minute, here’s what really happened,’ and have the due process and have the government decide, ‘Oh you’re right.’”
To make its case for the immediate inclusion of the data, the SASC’s report quotes the Interim Report of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq from February, which states that when contractor performance assessments aren’t added to databases fast enough, the risk of poor-performing companies receiving contracts increases.
The report states: “Federal past-performance policy provides for a lengthy comment, rebuttal, and review process, in which government officials and contractors record their database input sequentially. To avoid the delays these policies and procedures can create, government officials sometimes make an unduly generous assessment–or no assessment at all–of the true quality of contractors’ performance.”
In related news, the Professional Services Council (PSC) trade group is calling on the Senate to reject language in the House’s defense and military-construction appropriations bills that would prohibit contract awards to companies that have unpaid tax debts or have been convicted of federal criminal violations. Current regulations, which the bills would change, allow federal agencies to consider remedial measures or mitigation factors such companies have taken.
The “legislation strips companies of their due-process rights and strips agency (suspension and debarment official) of their ability to use their expert judgment to determine the most-appropriate course of action to protect the government’s interests,” PSC President and Chief Executive Officer Stan Soloway argues in a June 28 letter to Senate Appropriations Committee members. PSC is the trade association for the federal government’s professional and technical-services industry.