Panel backs enhanced oversight of interagency contracting

A federal acquisition panel on Thursday gave its preliminary approval to a series of recommendations to increase Office of Management and Budget oversight of interagency contracting, while allowing agencies to maintain control over the use of the contracting vehicles.

In an initial voting process, the Services Acquisition Reform Act Advisory Committee endorsed recommendations to collect data on federal agencies' use of interagency contracting vehicles and develop a system of oversight for this increasingly popular procurement strategy.

The series of nine recommendations, adopted on a preliminary basis with minor modifications, would maintain authority at the agency level for creation and use of such vehicles, while empowering OMB to develop guidelines for their use and to oversee agency compliance.

The recommendations emphasize the importance of developing comprehensive data to capture the number of interagency contracts in use, the scope of acquisitions made under these contracts and the reasons that agencies use them. This information is not now available.

OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy should conduct a survey of federal agencies to create a snapshot of activities associated with interagency contracting, and use that to inform development of a publicly accessible database, the working group that produced the recommendations said. Such a database would serve multiple users, the group said: agencies shopping for contracting vehicles suited to their particular purposes, managers seeking to develop agency acquisition strategies and oversight groups examining the use of governmentwide contracting and associated fees.

Six of the preliminary recommendations address coordination of oversight among agencies and OMB. The working group weighed the possibility of granting a strong coordinating body the power to approve or reject individual interagency contracting vehicles, but decided against that approach, said Jonathan Etherton, the group's co-chair.

A requirement that OMB approve individual contracting vehicles would demand resources and run the risk of creating a bottleneck, or alternately making the approval a "rubber-stamp" process, he said.

Instead, Etherton said, OMB should issue guidance to ensure that contracting vehicles are backed by sound business cases and are not excessively duplicative or overlapping. It also should make sure that fees charged are applied transparently and consistently, he said.

The panel agreed to this approach, but noted that such a guiding body should have the authority to enforce its policies. The recommendations endorsed include a measure for periodic review of governmentwide contracting and assessment of oversight effectiveness.

The advisory body is expected to continue discussing suggestions advanced by various working groups until July, when it is slated to vote on a comprehensive set of final recommendations.