Civilian agencies told to identify, train acquisition workers

Civilian agencies need to do a better job of identifying and training all the key players involved in federal procurement operations, according to the General Accounting Office. In a report issued Wednesday, the watchdog agency said that the Defense Department is doing a much better job in this area than its civilian counterparts.

"[Defense] and the military services have adopted multidisciplinary, multifunctional definitions of their acquisition workforce. The civilian agencies have not," GAO said in the report, "Acquisition Workforce: Agencies Need to Better Define and Track the Training of Their Employees," (GAO-02-737).

As acquisitions continue to become more complex, moving away from the purchase of individual items to the procurement of integrated sets of goods and services, experts say it is vital that all the stakeholders in the process work together as effectively as possible. During the past decade, lawmakers have acknowledged as much, passing legislation that requires agencies to boost training of their acquisition workforces. For example, the 1990 Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act and the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act require agencies to better define their procurement workforces and develop training guidelines for them.

GAO found that Defense includes officials from procurement, information technology, finance and program management in its definition of its acquisition workforce. But the five civilian agencies studied used narrower definitions, focusing on contracting specialists and purchasing agents. Three of the agencies also included the position of contracting officer technical representative-usually a program manager who oversees the performance of contractors.

Broader definitions would ensure that all those involved in a procurement get the right training to make the effort successful, GAO concluded.

"Acquisition is not looked upon strictly as an administrative function at Defense," said Mary Ackerman, senior acquisition specialist at Acquisitions Solutions Inc., a Chantilly, Va.-based consulting firm. Ackerman spent 17 years as a contracting officer in the Navy and another 13 years at civilian agencies-where, she said, "acquisition was largely viewed as a clerking exercise."

As a result, she said, program managers were rarely trained in the basics of procurement. While at the State Department, Ackerman said she held informal training sessions with program managers, teaching them about the government's purchasing schedules, the rules for bidding a contract and how long it takes to acquire a good or service.

GAO said that both the Defense and civilian agencies it studied had developed acquisition training programs. But the efforts of Defense agencies were better developed, largely because the department maintains a centralized management system to track data about acquisition personnel and the training they receive. Civilian agencies told GAO they are waiting for the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to launch a Web-based acquisition workforce information system for agencies to access.

In a written response to the GAO report, OFPP Administrator Angela Styles said, "Agencies are accountable for training their workforce. While a centralized tracking system…increases visibility of information at all levels within an agency, agencies are able to manage training with decentralized manual records. The absence of a centralized system is not an acceptable excuse."

For now, it remains unclear exactly what kind of training federal procurement officials are receiving. The Merit Systems Protection Board plans to conduct a survey this fall aimed partly at determining what kinds of training agencies provide to contracting officer technical representatives. The assumption behind the survey is that many people in such positions were not hired for that function, says Dee Ann Batten, senior research specialist at the MSPB. Rather, they were hired as engineers or scientists and assigned the additional task of monitoring contractor performance.

"We want to find out what kind of training these people are getting and hopefully identify some best practices," Batten said.