DOD officials crack down on incomplete award info

A top procurement official has warned defense agencies about upcoming checks of the information posted to a public DOD website for contract awards.

Richard Ginman, director of defense procurement and acquisition policy at the Defense Department, wrote in a July 8 memo that his office will check compliance with the five pieces of information the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement requires for each award announcement. Read the memo.

For procurements worth more than $5.5 million, regulations require general contract data, such as contract number, overall value, a description of the purchase and the type of competition conducted for the contract. Officials are also supposed to list the company that received the contract, the type of funding — for example, whether it’s a single-year appropriation or funded across multiple years — and other miscellaneous information.

Visit the DOD contract announcement website.

Ginman’s memo is a follow-up to a Government Accountability Office report from November 2010 that pointed out the lack of information on many awards.

DOD officials told GAO last year that contractors, investors and the press have an interest in the contract awards and closely monitor the daily postings. However, GAO found that defense agencies were not providing all the required details.

“Our analysis revealed a pattern of contract award announcements that lacked the information,” GAO auditors wrote to Shay Assad, who was DOD's director of defense procurement and acquisition policy at the time of GAO’s report.

Every military service and defense agency that submitted a contract award announcement in August 2010 had at least one submission that did not meet the requirements. In a more detailed analysis, GAO auditors found that 48 — or 96 percent — of the announcements posted on August 6, 2010, did not include one or more of the five categories of information.