SAM implementation changed from May 29 to the end of July 2012
May 21, 2012 by cs
At 4:30 pm on May 21, 2012, GSA issued the following announcement delaying the implementation of the new SAM system:
The General Services Administration (GSA) is moving the implementation date of the System for Award Management (SAM) from May 29, 2012 to end of July 2012. The additional sixty days will allow federal agencies to continue preparing their staff, give agencies and commercial system providers even more time to test their data transfer connections, and will ensure SAM contains the critical, documented capabilities users need from the system.
This first phase of SAM will include the capabilities of Central Contractor Registration (CCR)/Federal Agency Registration (FedReg), Online Representations and Certifications Application (ORCA), and the Excluded Parties List System (EPLS).
In preparation for the launch, GSA conducted extensive testing internally and in coordination with federal agencies using the data from these systems in their own contracting, grants, finance, and other departments. The testing was very valuable and will focus the efforts of the next sixty days.
SAM will reduce the burden on those seeking to do business with the government. Vendors will be able to log into one system to manage their entity information in one record, with one expiration date, through one streamlined business process. Federal agencies will be able to look in one place for entity pre-award information. Everyone will have fewer passwords to remember and see the benefits of data reuse as information is entered into SAM once and reused throughout the system.
Please see http://sam.gov/ or contact a GTPAC Counselor at www.gtpac.org/team-directory.
GSA readies draft RFP for $12 billion OASIS contract
May 3, 2012 by cs
When it comes to the final details of the General Services Administration’s new professional services contract, One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services, or OASIS, “everything is in play,” said Jim Ghiloni, GSA’s OASIS program manager.
Although he provided few concrete details about OASIS, he did unveil its timetable for the first time.
Keep reading this article at: http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2012/04/26/oasis-update.aspx?s=wtdaily_270412.
Schedule contract cancellation no big deal, experts say
April 30, 2012 by cs
The General Services Administration’s cancellation of Oracle Inc.’s Schedule 70 IT services contract was simply because the two could not reach an agreement on terms, deciding in the end to go their separate ways, experts say.
A senior GSA official said April 20 that it was not in the government’s best interest to continue to offer Oracle’s IT services though its Schedule. GSA officials would not provide further details.
However, one day earlier a spokeswoman said the cancellation was the result of the company not meeting the terms of the contract.
Experts said they were were not surprised by of GSA’s decision, nor did they say they believed Oracle had done something terrible.
“Since GSA isn’t suggesting suspension or debarment, and because GSA is openly referring to Oracle’s other reseller and partner channels to sell its offerings, actions leading to the cancellation are probably not egregious,” said Ray Bjorklund, vice president and chief knowledge officer at Deltek’s GovWin.
Mary Davie, assistant commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service Office’s of Integrated Technology Services, noted April 20 that agencies could still buy software and software maintenance from Oracle’s resellers that have IT Schedule 70 contracts.
As for directly working with Oracle, Davie said, “It was determined that it was not in the best interest of the government to continue the contract.”
In the meantime, Oracle has yet to comment on GSA’s action.
The cancellation takes effect May 17.
Oracle’s Schedule contract was to run from Oct. 1, 2006, to March 28, 2012. The Schedule was last updated September 30, 2011, Bjorklund said.
“One could infer that GSA and Oracle couldn’t reach agreement on the terms and conditions needed to renew or extend the contract,” he said.
A lot of procurement changes have happened since 2006 that may have arisen between the two. There may have been differences in opinion about Oracle’s interest in its proprietary data rights, payment terms or rules that affect overseas work, Bjorklund said.
In addition, experts said the decision could stem from Oracle’s inability to comply with existing contractual stipulations because the company has changed the way it conducts business since the contract was last modified.
Mark Amtower, partner of Amtower and Company, said major corporations often struggle with GSA’s demands on sales records. Companies the size of Oracle may not be able to provide all of their sales information.
“When a worldwide company like Oracle is required to provide pricing data for every product sold, it is akin to Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill,” he said.
GSA Schedule contracts are under the Price Reduction Clause, which requires the government to get at least the same sale price as any other client.
GSA’s move came several months after Oracle agreed to pay a $200 million fine for its failure to comply with the terms and conditions of its Schedule contract.
“Now, in addition to the fine, Oracle will have to find other ways to sell to federal customers,” Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners, wrote in his weekly ‘The Week Ahead’ newsletter.
Overall, the reaction from experts is that the cancellation won’t be a huge blow to Oracle or its sales.
Schedule 70 is not a preferred vehicle for IT, Amtower said. It has become more or less a default vehicle.
According to Amtower, Oracle’s Schedule contract accounts for less than 7 percent of total government purchases.
Oracle’s sales are coming through other contracts, such as NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurements and other Defense Department indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts.
Bjorklund said this latest action is unlikely to dampen any interest in what Oracle offers the government; nor is it any grand-scale initiative on the part of GSA.
“When parties can’t agree, it’s just time to cancel the contract and try to start over again,” he said.
About the Author: Matthew Weigelt is a senior writer covering acquisition and procurement for Federal Computer Week. This article was published on Apr. 23, 2012 at http://washingtontechnology.com/Articles/2012/04/23/reaction-GSA-oracle-cancellation.aspx?s=wtdaily_240412&Page=2.
VA pushes relationship repair with industry suppliers
April 23, 2012 by cs
When Maurice Stewart arrived at the Veterans Affairs Department a few years ago, he joined a procurement office that was in extreme distress.
VA faced the prospect of running 20 percent over its budget for commodities and IT services in fiscal 2010 due to costly redundancies and other chronic dysfunctions.
The odds that procurement officials and industry leaders could join forces to tackle any of the problems seemed slim given the dwindling interaction — and trust — between the two sides.
The department’s contracting officers were notorious for not returning phone calls. Contracts routinely went out the door late. And vendors had no insight into a contract’s requirements until the official request for proposals hit the street, which limited their ability to propose alternative or more creative solutions.
All that chaos had a direct impact on the agency’s mission. “If we can’t put good requirements out on the street, we can’t serve the veteran,” said Stewart, VA’s associate deputy assistant secretary for logistics policy and supply chain management.
VA officials now believe they have begun to put those problems behind them, thanks to a three-year-old initiative that Stewart leads called the Supplier Relationship Transformation (SRT) program. It is based on the premise that, as Stewart said, “improving dialogue is essential to the health of government procurement.”
VA officials began by surveying vendors and holding industry forums around the country last year. Armed with the feedback they received — much of it brutally honest — they are now developing targeted, multipronged plans to address the biggest problems.
VA is hardly alone in this battle. Procurement offices across government struggle with strained relationships and poor communication with suppliers. Government procurement and industry executives say the problem, at least in part, is an unintended consequence of President Barack Obama’s efforts to tighten ethics rules in contracting.
The message that many procurement officials heard was that they could only stay out of trouble by playing it safe, and that meant avoiding contact with vendors unless absolutely necessary.
Now, officials are trying to reverse that trend through efforts such as VA’s SRT program, the General Services Administration’s supplier relationship management initiative and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy’s myth-busters campaign.
Getting feedback from industry and internal agency customers is an important first step. Translating that knowledge into policy and managerial guidance that can change attitudes and behaviors is a bit trickier, but it’s a challenge that officials say they must embrace.
No pain, no gain
VA procurement officials realized that if they wanted to improve, they would need to understand where they were falling short, and that meant listening to some harsh criticism.
SRT is VA’s first enterprisewide effort to gather quantitative data and qualitative insight into what’s wrong with the agency’s acquisition processes. The program includes semi-annual supplier perception surveys, quarterly internal customer perception surveys, annual webinars and supplier outreach forums. This year, officials have already held forums in Denver and Atlanta, with plans to do the same in Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
The feedback gathered so far has been frank — often painfully so. “Suppliers gave them an earful,” said Doug Black, a director at the Ambit Group, which has worked with VA on the SRT program since the beginning.
Several key problem areas have been identified, including:
- Inadequate communications. Transparency in the acquisition process needs to be improved and should include ways for vendors to offer feedback on requirements for specific contracts and the overall process.
- Poor customer service. Contractors would like to see improvements in the level and quality of acquisition support they receive, such as having phone calls returned and contract modifications addressed in a timely manner.
- Unclear roles. Companies struggle to understand the differing roles and responsibilities of contracting officers, contracting officer’s representatives and program managers.
- A closed contracting process. Companies would like to provide input on the contract type and definition of requirements early in the process so they can offer VA the best prices and delivery timelines in their proposals.
In general, company leaders told VA officials they didn’t think the department cared about their profitability or adequately shared the risks that come with contracting. Therefore, contractors had no choice but to reflect that risk in the form of higher prices.
On the road to recovery
The grievances were no surprise to Jaime Gracia, president and CEO of Seville Government Consulting, an acquisition and program management consulting firm. For example, he said that many companies in the service-disabled veteran-owned small-business community, of which his firm is a part, are frustrated with VA’s certification process. VA officials say it should take three months for the agency to certify a company as eligible to compete for special contracts set aside for that community.
“I’ve not met anyone who got through it in three months,” Gracia said. “It may happen, but I’ve never heard of it.”
He said some companies are choosing to avoid that bureaucratic process and are looking elsewhere for business. He sees the SRT program as a positive sign.
“The VA is far from stellar, but they recognize it and are going in the right direction,” he said.
The feedback has been hard for some VA managers to take. “Initially, some folks were reluctant to read what was reported on the surveys,” Stewart said.
But only by identifying and understanding the problems can officials begin to craft plans to solve them. Fortunately, those efforts are already under way.
For example, last year the VA acquisition office formed an industry advisory group of 24 companies of varying sizes. The group meets quarterly to share best practices and provide targeted suggestions to help VA improve relationships with vendors.
VA also established a governance council of acquisition leaders, which is led by the chief acquisition officer and the senior procurement executive and includes policy experts and the small-business procurement director. The council’s purpose is to develop specific action plans for improvement.
That group came up with the idea of having VA’s Technology Acquisition Center conduct advanced planning briefings for industry. Contracting officers and program managers can now bring companies in to talk about upcoming procurements so they have an opportunity to provide feedback and suggestions early in the process.
Such programs are still fairly new, but as more suppliers are getting involved and seeing that VA officials are committed to improvement, negative attitudes are beginning to change, Stewart said.
Based on the responses to the supplier perception surveys, VA is making measurable progress. Vendors are asked to use a five-point scale to rate VA’s performance in specific areas. When the first survey was conducted in October 2010, the agency scored 3.5 or higher in only two areas. In the second and third semi-annual follow-up surveys, companies gave VA a rating of 3.5 or higher in four areas.
In addition, 17 areas received ratings below 3.0 in the first survey. In the second survey, 12 areas scored below 3.0, and VA only had five areas rated below 3.0 in the third survey.
Turning the tide
The need to strengthen relationships with industry is pervasive throughout government. An independent survey of contractors released in February reported a worsening relationship between government contracting officers and industry representatives.
Ten percent of respondents in Grant Thornton’s 17th annual Government Contractor Industry Survey said the relationship with contracting officers was “fair or poor,” double the percentage who gave that rating in the previous year’s survey. Moreover, only 22 percent of the more than 100 companies surveyed said they believe the government resolves contract issues efficiently, a drop from 26 percent in the previous year.
The Obama administration has been trying to improve relationships with industry suppliers. For example, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy released its myth-busters memo in February 2011 to encourage agency officials to increase their communication with industry. The memo emphasized that it is not against the rules to discuss upcoming contracts and procurements before bid proposals are formally solicited. In fact, those discussions are necessary.
“If OFPP had to issue that memo, it indicates there’s a serious problem,” said Robert Burton, former deputy administrator at OFPP and now a partner at Venable law firm.
Only after Burton left government for the private sector did he realize how closed off most of the government acquisition workforce is from industry, he said. Stewart said he had a similar reaction during his time in the private sector.
The General Services Administration, which handles $50 billion in business volume annually, is also working on ways to improve relationships and communication with vendors, said Steve Kempf, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS).
GSA officials are planning to launch a supplier relationship management initiative, and like their counterparts at VA, they are starting with an assessment of the current state of relationships.
The agency recently surveyed 50,000 contractors to see how they perceived FAS as a business partner. Officials planned to share the results among GSA procurement managers in April. Kemp said the results will contribute to the development of specific action plans.
In addition, GSA has been making an effort to incorporate companies’ input earlier in the contract development process. For example, GSA’s Interact website hosts a community for industry members who are interested in providing input as GSA develops a new professional services contract called One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (formerly Integrations).
Keeping the momentum going
The key to all those efforts is follow-through and continuing engagement, Stewart and other executives say.
As part of VA’s SRT program, Stewart hosts an end-of-year webinar for vendors, a sort of State of the Union address for VA’s acquisition community.
At the third such update, held last month, all of VA’s senior acquisition leaders shared the improvements their offices have made in the past year based on vendors’ feedback.
“What we try to do is show them we’ve made changes and show them improvements,” Stewart said. “If you don’t keep them engaged, they’re going to feel, ‘Why should I invest my time and resources?’ Without their investment, you have nothing.”
Tips for better conversations
Agencies can build a more competitive pool of bidders by reaching out to the vendor community early in the procurement process and asking company leaders to share their ideas and expertise. But participants on both sides fear running afoul of acquisition regulations and jeopardizing contracts, which has kept many of them from pursuing greater engagement.
Last year, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy launched a campaign to dispel common misconceptions about such interactions and encourage responsible and constructive exchanges.
Among other guidance, the myth-busters campaign advises government procurement employees to:
- Communicate with vendors early, frequently and constructively.
- Talk to various categories of small businesses.
- Talk to vendors you have not worked with in the past.
- Protect private information, including vendors’ confidential information and details on the agency’s source-selection process.
[Source: Office of Federal Procurement Policy]
Soliciting honest feedback
Officials might have to suffer some bruising criticism if they want to improve their procurement performance and relationships with industry.
To see what their contractors think of the job they are doing, Veterans Affairs Department officials conduct semi-annual surveys that ask contractors to assess the agency’s performance.
Topics include:
- The company’s commitment to VA for a long-term business relationship.
- VA’s effectiveness in sharing risk and reducing the company’s need to build risk into its pricing.
- The extent to which VA makes it easy for companies to succeed and effectively provide goods and services.
- The overall quality of the working relationship between VA and the company.
— by Matthew Weigelt – Federal Computer Week - Apr. 16, 2012 at http://fcw.com/articles/2012/04/30/feat-government-industry-relations.aspx.
GSA scandal sheds light on small business contracting fraud
April 10, 2012 by cs
Buried in the laundry list of misconduct claims against the General Services Administration is further evidence of what at least one federal official and one trade group call a critical problem for small employers: improper contracting that diverts government spending to large corporations instead of small businesses.
GSA Administrator Martha N. Johnson resigned Monday and two of her senior deputies have been fired in the wake of the agency’s spending scandal.
The GSA inspector general’s report, which blasts the agency for excessive spending on clowns, mind readers and lavish parties during a training conference just outside Las Vegas, claims that officials awarded a $58,808 contract to a large audio and visual services firm, Royal Productions, when federal regulations require contracts of such size be reserved for small businesses.
The inspector general also said the agency violated federal rules by neglecting to publish a solicitation for the contract on the government’s list of Federal Business Opportunities and by providing Royal Productions with a competing bidder’s quote — thus allowing the company to present a winning offer. Subsequently, the agency paid roughly double what the contract outlined for the company’s employees’ hotel rooms, according to the report.
Although the scandal alleges a wide range of misconduct, the contracting accusations shed light on a problem that some say has been crippling the nation’s small businesses for more than a decade.
“The diversion of small-business contracts to large corporations has gone on for a dozen years, and the only thing the government has done in response is remove the transparency,” Lloyd Chapman, president of the American Small Business League, said in an interview, later adding that the procurement review system available to the public has become increasingly difficult to use in recent years.
The federal government has a stated goal of awarding 23 percent of contract dollars every year to small businesses. However, Chapman pointed to his group’s recent analysis of government data that showed that 72 of the 100 companies receiving the highest amount of federal small-business contracts in 2011 were firms that exceeded the Small Business Administration’s size standards for small companies.
“Anytime you take a sample of what the federal government is doing and anytime you take a look at small-business contracting in almost any federal agency, what you find is money going to the biggest companies in the world,” he said.
In October, the SBA’s inspector general published a report acknowledging that small-business contracting was the agency’s most serious management and performance challenge. Specifically, the report stated that “procurement flaws allow large firms to obtain small business awards and agencies to count contracts performed by large firms towards their small business goals.”
But the SBA says the Obama administration has taken steps to bring more contracting opportunities to small businesses, noting that the president created an interagency task force charged with increasing their share of government work and signed the Small Business Jobs Act, which agency officials say levels the playing field for small companies competing for federal contracts.
“These initiatives have made a real difference,” SBA Deputy Administrator Marie Johns wrote on the agency’s blog. “The number of contracts going to small businesses has steadily risen in the last two years,” she wrote, noting that the government nearly hit its 23 percent small-business contracting goal last year.
When Congress returns from recess in two weeks, the public-buildings subpanel of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee plans to conduct a full hearing on the claims of wasteful spending against the GSA, according to the committee’s chairman, Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), who said “the Las Vegas fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg.”
– By J.D. Harrison, The Washington Post, Wednesday, April 4, 7:15 AM at http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/gsa-scandal-sheds-light-on-small-business-contracting-fraud/2012/04/03/gIQAJUOtuS_story.html
Congressman Graves and GSA host small business forum in Dalton on Apr. 10
April 1, 2012 by cs
“Government and Small Business Moving Forward Together” is the theme of the forum being hosted by the Atlanta Regional Office of the U.S. General Services Administration and Congressman Tom Graves (GA-9) on Tuesday, April 10, 2012.
The event is being held at Dalton City Hall, 300 W. Waugh Street, Dalton, GA 30720.
Details may be found in the event flyer at April 10 2012 Congressman Graves Dalton GA Small Business Conference.
Schedule 70 chief lays out management goals
March 28, 2012 by cs
Contractors on the General Services Administration’s major Multiple Award IT Schedule 70 should watch for changes.
Kay Ely, director of the Schedule since September, laid out her top management priorities March 15 to make operations run better and more smoothly, according to Allen Federal Business Partners’ The Week Ahead newsletter.
Ely wants to:
- Digitize all contract files.
- Expand the use of electronic contracting for end-to-end contract management.
- Shorten the time it takes modify a contract. This should make the schedule more competitive.
- Make Schedule 70 consistent across its components, so IT contracting officials give their customers and contractors consistent and correct answers.
- Enhance the skills of the IT Schedule’s acquisition workforce.
Ely believes that achieving just some of the goals “would go a long way to restoring the luster of the IT Schedule, and most likely help increase business conducted through it,” according to the report.
– by Matthew Weigelt, Federal Computer Week, Mar 19, 2012 at http://fcw.com/blogs/acquisitive-mind/2012/03/gsa-schedule-70-priorities.aspx.
Government to increase contractor notifications for GSA Schedules
March 26, 2012 by cs
The government will increase the amount of notifications it gives to contractors who hold spots on General Services Administration schedules, the Washington Post reports. (The article appears at http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/government-adds-rule-for-acquisitions/2012/03/08/gIQAYiHeLS_story.html)
As of March 19, 2012, new acquisition rules require agencies to notify companies on a given schedule of all opportunities ranging from $3,000 to $150,000.
Agencies must allow the company to make an offer and contracting officers must consider the offer.
Agencies who follow the schedule but do not notify contractors must receive at least three proposals before awarding a purchase.
If an agency does not receive three proposals, it must give a written justification of why it did not.
Purchases valued at more than $150,000 are covered under these type of acquisition regulations.
– reported by ExecutiveGov, March 19, 2012 at http://www.executivegov.com/2012/03/govt-to-increase-contractor-notifications-for-gsa-schedules/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+execgov+%28Executive+Gov%29.
How The New York Times Co. became a small business
March 19, 2012 by cs
Perhaps for as long as the federal government has reported which of its contracts have been awarded to small businesses, critics have charged that many of those contracts have actually gone to large companies — often very large companies.
Recently, the American Small Business League, perhaps the loudest of those critics, tried to outline the scope of diversion. The association issued a report that studied the 100 companies that won the most federal small-business contract dollars in 2011 and found that at least 72 of them either had too many employees or too much revenue to be eligible for government assistance to small business. (S.B.A. size standards vary by industry and sector, but generally a company must have fewer than 500 employees or less than $7 million to be considered small.)
The federal government, the world’s largest buyer of goods and service, is obliged by law to try to direct 23 percent of its purchases to small businesses, though there are no penalties for failure. The government hasn’t reached that goal in years, and while recording a deal with a bigger business as a small-business contract — whether by mistake or by fraud — does not necessarily mean that a small company has been denied an opportunity, it does exaggerate the government’s contracting achievement. In the view of Elliott Rosenfeld, of the league, said that in turn undermined the case for stronger enforcement of contracting rules. And by inflating an agency’s sense of achievement, it could weaken the agency’s drive to award more contracts to small businesses.
S.B.A. officials, for their part, insist the league’s analysis is premature. This summer, the S.B.A. will release its own report on the government’s contracting efforts in 2011, said a spokeswoman, Hayley Meadvin, after spending months reviewing the records. “By the time we release our fiscal year report, we have corrected these mistakes,” she said. “We spend a lot time making sure our data is as clean as can be.”
Moreover, the league has been prone to sweeping accusations. The group called this latest report, for instance, “strong evidence that large companies are the fraudulent recipients of the majority of federal small-business contracts every year.” But even if improperly coded contracts are as pervasive as the association claims, is it necessarily the result of fraud?
The Agenda decided to look at one large company, mentioned incidentally in the report, that won small business contracts in 2011, to try to find out: The New York Times Company. The Times was not among the league’s list of 100; it was identified as one of 55 well-known corporations that received small-business contracts last year when it sold $56,821 worth of newspapers to the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. — 500 daily subscriptions for the 28 weeks school is in session, according to Carol D’Andrea, The Times’s circulation manager for sales to schools and colleges.
In the government’s record of the West Point transaction, known as a contact action report, The Times is described as having $3 billion in revenue — and 10 employees. (Both figures were wrong: in 2011, the company’s revenue was $2.3 billion and the work force totaled 7,273 employees, according to the most recent annual report.) In a field labeled “Contracting Officer’s Business Size Selection,” the document describes The Times as a “small business.” Under government size standards, newspaper publishers must have fewer than 500 employees to be considered small.
Our inquiry began with a call to West Point. The contracting officer who approved the deal, Kathleen Judson, said in a brief interview that she had not designated The New York Times as a small business. “The only way that could have happened is that it must have been prepopulated,” she said. “Sometimes the fields come through on the contract action report prepropulated. I know The New York Times is a large company.”
Here’s where it starts to get complicated — and government officials contacted by The Agenda offered little help in clearing up the confusion. S.B.A. officials spoke authoritatively about the agency’s efforts to correct contracting records, but referred our questions about how those records are created to the General Services Administration, which oversees the procurement infrastructure used across the government. The G.S.A.’s deputy press secretary, Adam Elkington, initially sent us to the Army for answers, then later promised to find us a colleague who could answer basic contracting questions. (He never did.) A spokesman for West Point, Frank DeMaro, wrote down our questions but did not answer them. Eventually, Daniel Elkins, a spokesman for the Army’s Mission and Installation Contracting Command at Fort Sam Houston, in Texas, fielded some of our queries.
This is what we know: every entity selling to the government must sign up with the G.S.A.’s Central Contractor Registration with a unique identification number, known as a DUNS number, from Dun & Bradstreet. The vendor supplies its annual revenue and employee headcount for the entire organization, which the S.B.A. uses to determine whether the entity is a small business. What complicates things is that companies must register each legal division, or any office with a separate location or address separately. The New York Times currently has at least three active contractor registrations. One of these was set up by Ms. D’Andrea and her colleagues in The Times’s Education Sales department in order, she said, to sell the subscriptions to West Point.
The Times is not identified as a small business in the Education Sales department’s registration. It turns out, though, that West Point did not use this registration to pay The Times. Instead, the contract refers to the DUNS number used by another registered Times Company entity, this one made by the TimesCenter, an event hall at the company’s headquarters on Eighth Avenue. In that registration, The Times did identify itself as a small business.
A Times Company spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, said by e-mail that the employees who initially registered the TimesCenter were no longer employed there. But, she said, when the TimesCenter first opened, “it was operated as an independent business, separate from The New York Times Company. It is possible that the small-business designation was one that fit at the time, but again, we do not know for sure.” Ms. Murphy said she did not know whether the TimesCenter was independently owned at the time or just operated as if it were. Today, she said, it is operated as part of The New York Times. Nor could she say whether, or why, a Times employee entered the inaccurate revenue and headcount figures.
At West Point, neither Ms. Judson or Mr. DeMaro have explained why Ms. Judson used the registration from the TimesCenter rather than the one from the Education Sales department. (In an e-mail, the Army’s Mr. Elkins said “multiple actions between the N.Y. Times registration of DUNS numbers and contracting officer actions makes it difficult to identify the exact sequence of events.”) But Ms. Meadvin of the S.B.A. disputed the claim that the business size field was automatically filled in, saying, “to our knowledge” it is “the only field that is manually entered.” Mr. Elkington of the G.S.A. did not respond to our request seeking clarification.
In any event, government contracting officers like Ms. Judson are not supposed to rely on information from the Central Contractor Registration to determine whether a business is small — the registration record says as much at the very top. Instead, they are obligated to verify size, or any other claims a company makes, with a separate database known as the Online Representations and Certifications Application, or ORCA — which imports size information from the Central Contractor Registration. (Filling out this form, Ms. D’Andrea said, “is worse than filling out your taxes. Just the password is 16 digits and you can’t have repeating letters and numbers.”)
However, while the Education Sales department submitted an ORCA form — and did not claim small-business status — the TimesCenter, the entity on the contract, never did complete the form. According to Mr. Elkins of the Army, “Before the contracts were awarded, the contracting officer observed that there were no Online Representations and Certifications Application records for The New York Times.” The officer then tried to verify The Times’s size, Mr. Elkins said, by turning to yet another database, the Dynamic Small Business Search maintained by the S.B.A., “using the DUNS that was initially provided by The N.Y. Times.” But, said Mr. Elkins, “this procedure was improper and led to the miscoded award; the Army should have asked for this information from the N.Y. Times, rather than relying upon the D.S.B. search engine.”
But if a record for a Times entity existed in the Dynamic Small Business database last year, it is gone now, and this explanation raises additional questions. Which DUNS number did The Times provide to the Army — the one that ended up on the contract, from the TimesCenter, or one from the education sales department? Moreover, if Ms. Judson knew The Times was in fact a large business, why would she conduct a Dynamic Small Business search in the first place? Finally, the actions described here suggest Ms. Judson did in fact have to manually enter the vendor’s business size in the contract, as the S.B.A. has maintained. (Mr. Elkins has not responded to requests for further explanation.)
As it happens, three other federal agencies have used the TimesCenter registration as the basis for contracts in recent years — apparently erroneously, since these agencies were buying newspaper ads, not renting out an event space — and in most of those contract action reports, The Times is described as “other than small.” And yet, for one contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission, The Times was again deemed a small business. The contract officer in that instance referred the Agenda to the S.E.C. press office to set up an interview, which a spokesman has thus far declined to do.
And that’s as far as we have been able to get. We still can’t say with certainty how The Times ended up with a small-business contract. What we did find was a record-keeping system so complex that it invites confusion and error from all parties. “We hear from our small-business members that navigating the federal marketplace is extremely confusing and complex,” said Molly Brogan, a spokeswoman for the National Small Business Association, an advocacy group based in Washington. “Perhaps some level of simplification — along with enhanced oversight and repercussions for those that knowingly miscode a large business as small — would alleviate some of these issues.”
Things may improve this year, when the G.S.A. is to merge the two separate contractor databases into one as part of a bigger move to consolidate all of the different systems — nine of them! — that constitute the government’s “Integrated Acquisition Environment.” According to Ms. Meadvin, the S.B.A. believes that eventually the system will operate the way the people at West Point seem to believe it already does: business size representations from ORCA will be among the data automatically entered into the contract action report.
But for now, small-business advocates bemoan a system that allows everyone involved to evade responsibility for their actions. “The ‘pass the blame’ game you’ve seen from the S.B.A. and the Army is highly indicative of a lack of accountability by the federal employees whose duty it is to ensure that the contracting process is handled professionally and fairly,” said Mr. Rosenfeld of the league. “The erroneous entry into C.C.R. by The Times is also an example of how a large company’s negligence can contribute to the problem.
“Contract error and mismanagement amounts to tens of billions of dollars’ worth of contracts a year being diverted away from small business,” he added. “With such faulty standards of oversight, accountability and transparency, we wonder how easy it must be to hide fraud in the federal contracting process.”
– by ROBB MANDELBAUM, The New York Times, Mar. 15, 2012; this article appears at http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/how-the-new-york-times-became-a-small-business.