Open Dialogue on Improving How to Do Business with the Federal Government 2. Procurement Rules and Practices

In addition to requiring a pre solicitation phase in all procurements over a certain threshold to be determined by Agency Contracting Head, I would recommend a more involved use of performance based acquisition practices for initial strategy adoption and O&M efforts in information technology. This includes the occasional coupling with incentive based contracting where appropriate. When these parts of the FAR are used ...more »

IRS and CAGE validation can take 2 weeks for contractors updating their annual registration. The problem is companies doing business with agencies are ineligible from receiving contracts/contract awards until the validation process is complete. The process should be changed for conmpanies renewing their annual registration or adding new NAICS etc. Companies could potentially lose business and bid & proposal cost as ...more »

Having held a GSA contract for years, I make the following observations/recommendations: 1) There needs to be a mandated response time from GSA COs and buyers. We had a CO that never returned e-mails or calls. Truly never. We finally got transferred to a new officer but it still can take days to get responses. If there were no deadlines, that would be great. The same holds true for buyers who are responsible for ...more »

Contractors are supposed to submit their initial best offer because award might be done without discussion. But we all know that once the contractors are ranked and graded and the competitive range is established, most of the time, the Contracting officer will issue a request for Best and Final Offer. Proposal development is costly. Multiple submissions also cost money. Contracting Officers are "required" to always ask ...more »

Rewrite FAR Part 17.207 for options. Flip the requirement for due diligence to focus on those contracts where the option will NOT be exercised rather than when it will be exercised. Probably 99.99% of options are exercised each fiscal year. This is a huge resource drain on COs and keeps contractors in limbo for no reason. Eliminate this pencil whip exercise so that COs can focus on getting the funding modification correct ...more »

The dollar cost involved in the production of a proposal has already been broken down in other Ideas. I would like to add the human cost to the mix. It seems to be standard practice for solicitations to be released right before the Acquisition Office leaves for the week or season. It is common for Industry to receive a solicitation on a Friday afternoon, or a couple of days before a major holiday (this seems especially ...more »

The time is right for a public policy discussion contrasting the SWOT for fully outsourcing government IT - no longer would government own, maintain, and upgrade IT infrastructure or application development, but instead private industry would provide government with secure cloud-based DaaS/SaaS that would accelerate commercial as well as government security, convenience, affordability, and trust compared to ownership. ...more »

Currently there is a Commercial Items test programs that allows use of SAP up to $6.5M for commercial items, or NDIs that have been sold to State and Local Governments. Unfortunately some design activities are wary about providing commercial item determinations because they fear it could cause them to lose control of the item to another design activity or lose Quality Assurance capabilities. There is also a military ...more »

See attached document for details.

GSA needs to have a single senior manager to advance the Schedules Program. This +30Billion dollar program needs to be updated to allow significant taxpayer savings and eliminate contract duplication.There is no one in charge of this multi-billion dollar commercial services and products program.

Given the breadth of the complaints, perhaps it is time to create a new major panel similar to the Section 800 panel to address this issues in depth and systematically. Such a group could have the support of both the Congress and the Administration and the product of that group would be much more likely to obtain broad support, as FASA received overwhelming bi-partisan approval and resulted in significant change.

It seems that FAPIIS and CO’s do not look closely enough at a contractor’’ entire record, and that they look primarily at whether the company has been caught violating the law or cheating workers on federal contracts. This makes no sense. Contractors who cheat workers or who cut corners elsewhere are just as likely to do that on a federal job if it increases their bottom line, and they should not be rewarded with more ...more »