What’s a COTR?

ne of the most important parts of any acquisition team is its contracting officer technical representative. Such people are supposed to be experts on what agencies purchase, and they are largely responsible for overseeing contractor performance.

Although COTRs have been in existence for years, they were not officially recognized as a critical part of the acquisition workforce until 1996. That was when the Clinger-Cohen Act required agencies to develop training programs for COTRs.

Little is known, however about whether those programs are creating a force of effective contracting experts. "We haven't seen any studies done on them," says Dee Ann Batten, sen-ior research analyst for the Merit Systems Protection Board. "We need to understand who they are, what their workload is like and what kind of training they are getting."

To that end, the board is embarking on a survey this summer to understand this segment of the federal workforce. The assumption behind the survey is that many people acting as COTRs were not hired for that function, says Batten. Rather, they were hired as engineers or scientists and assigned the additional task of monitoring contractor performance.

Through its survey, the board hopes to get a better sense of the COTR community, its workload and the kind of training it receives. In the end, the board hopes to develop a set of best practices to share with agencies. Batten expects to publish a final report by the end of the year.