Read the following and answer the questions: What do you think of this procurement approach? Is there
Question:
Read the following and answer the questions:
What do you think of this procurement approach?
Is there anything wrong with what the contracting officer has been told to do?
Assuming that there is actually some benefit to having fewer contracts, is there a better way to go about it?
This is a situation I worked on in 2013. Without naming names, the situation was a show cause letter. That is to say, a letter basically saying "you have one last chance to tell us why we shouldn't terminate the contract for default." Needless to say, this kind of letter is something that every contractor must take seriously. There was behind this letter a very interesting situation concerning which I invite your comments. This was an IDIQ contract for services on a time and materials basis. Apparently, every offer or submitting an acceptable offer was given a contract, but the task orders were rather oddly handed out. "Ordering contracting officers" all over the country could place task orders. Performance was measured on the basis of ten or so quality measures that were 12 month moving averages. Thus, if a contractor had a problem, there was no immediate fix for the measurement because no matter how well the recent performance, any prior problem continued to impact the measurement. Given the industry, there was also a question whether the measurements were realistic. Given the nature of the measurements, the fewer task orders received, the harder to change the moving average of the quality measures. Of the approximately two dozen contracts, only one contractor met all the measurement standards. So the contractor gets a "cure notice" from the contracting officer. A lengthy response is provided. Two weeks later the show cause letter shows up. The show cause letter does not refer to the response to the cure notice at all. Rumor has it that the contracting officer has been directed to winnow down the number of contracts by doing a bunch of terminations for default.
Accounting concepts and applications
ISBN: 978-0538745482
11th Edition
Authors: Albrecht Stice, Stice Swain