Fool Me Twice
For years, government folks have been talking about the need to hold contractors accountable for their past performance. Looks like there's still a lot of work to do.
Last week, the House Government Management, Organization and Procurement Subcommittee heard about a litany of problems from witnesses involving poor performers and agencies that look the other way.
In a curtain-raiser, the New York Times told an anecdote about Wackenhut Corp.. The company apparently tipped off its guards at Oak Ridge Reservation, the nuclear weapons production operation, about an impending security test. The Times reported that Wackenhut falsified records about training at the facility, according to auditors.
"Despite those performance issues and problems with its work at other agencies, Wackenhut, which defends its record, continued to receive government security contracts, collecting $1.3 billion from the federal government since 2004," the paper said.
In its story about the hearing, Washington Technology reported that contractors win work in part because the government keeps such poor records and because the standards for holding them accountable are so ambiguous.
Richard Skinner, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security, testified that reporting systems intended to help officials keep track of bad contractors often contain no useful information about misdeeds -- or any meaningful information about performance at all.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY), the subcommittee's chairman, took aim at other contractors. He expressed pique that companies that cut corners keep getting work on the taxpayers' dime.
"I remember the told saying, 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.' Well, in my view, the taxpayers are being fooled time and time again," he said in his opening statement.
By Robert O'Harrow |
July 24, 2007; 6:18 AM ET
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Posted by: Michael Lent | July 24, 2007 7:16 AM
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Yep, contractors do a poor job, sometimes. But what is the percentage of poor performance in the scope of all cases?
No one has the stats, but it would be hard to find a government official, industry observer, or services provider who believes, in his/her heart of hearts, that it is anything but very small.
The government often forces upon the contractor the opportunity to screw up. Example: the Navy hid--or did not know--that it had a few thousand, not a few hundred, as bidders were told--of app systems that needed to be converted to the NMCI. That little problem ruined the original schedule and presented a mountain of financial risk to EDS. BTW, EDS contributed its own serious problems to those early fiasco years, e.g., having subcontractors bear less risk and get paid sooner than EDS.
Ditto, SAIC and the FBI Virtual Case File System. Director Mueller has admitted that his agency mismanaged the program, including the oversight and facilitation of needed government actions on the contract. That made it more likely, in an infrequent poor showing, for SAIC to do over $100 M of work that was judged by the government to be worthy of scrapping.
So, it takes two to tango much of the time. It is hard to find a case of a troubled contract where the government is not significantly involved in causing or promoting or negligently ignoring contractor problems.
Because of this, creating an objective, consistent record of contractor performance is extremely difficult. Federal officials understandably do not want to document their own failings.
What many of us would like to see is some documentation of industry--and government--successes.
It would also be interesting to see some systematic past performance coverage of government officials managing programs. Only OMB and Congress could make that emerge as a companion piece to oversight and appropriations hearings. Prediction, we'll never see it.