The Customs Service indefinitely postponed the release of a request for proposals for its embattled Customs Modernization Project Thursday due to lack of funding. The project would upgrade computer systems at ports and offices around the nation.
Customs is in dire need of such an upgrade. Users of Customs' current system, the Automated Commercial System (ACS), experience frequent brownouts. These brownouts can delay trade at over 300 ports of entry operated by Customs.
Customs lawyers would not let the final RFP, set to be released this week, past an internal legal review. With no money appropriated for the project this year, issuing the RFP would have been a violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. This act prevents agencies both from spending unavailable funds and obligating funds before appropriations are made by Congress.
"We can't legally issue the RFP until the funding issue gets resolved," said Michael Rebain, contracting officer for the Customs Modernization Project. "Now we've gone to the Treasury Department and are saying, 'We're ready to go.'" The Customs Modernization Project is expected to cost up to $2 billion and take from 10 to 15 years.
Customs officials tried to sidestep the modernization project's perennial lack of money by including innovative funding measures in the contract. The draft RFP, released mid-October 1999, asks bidding contractors to consider and suggest their own funding alternatives, including cost saving and cost sharing tactics, also know as the share-in-savings contracting approach. Any share-in-savings approach in the final contract award would be "an incentive in addition to other pricing in the contract," said Rebain.
"Modernization is going to have to happen," said Rebain. "We had to go ahead and prepare the RFP. If we didn't, we felt we'd never get in a position where Congress would fund the contract-it's kind of a chicken and egg question."
And while officials search for funding and enter yet another budget cycle, Customs is left with a system that strains to handle processing at current trade levels. The current system's brownouts are the direct result of a 16-year-old, mainframe-based system that has trouble growing to meet new information processing needs.
"We've experienced frequent brownouts when we've reached the physical capacity of the ACS," said Charles R. Armstrong, director of the Customs Modernization Office. "We expect that trade will double by 2005. This means the transaction level our systems must process will double."
Customs' contracting officials had hoped to release the RFP this week in order to award the final contract on June 1, 2000.
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