Two years after it offered recommendations to strengthen the workforce charged with overseeing technical aspects of contracts, the General Services Administration’s inspector general said the agency has still not fully complied.
In an Aug. 3 follow-up to a previous report, the IG said that three recommendations from its original report still haven’t been applied.
Related: Read the report
The 2014 report examined whether FAS was adequately monitoring the certification process of its contracting officer’s representatives, or CORs, who are appointed by contracting officers to oversee the technical aspects of contracts. The IG reported that there was a lack of oversight and adherence to Office of Federal Procurement Policy requirements, Federal Acquisition Certification for Contracting Officer’s Representatives program, as well as GSA guidance on the subject.
As part of its recommendations to correct the problem, the OIG said that FAS should put in controls to ensure CORs were registered in the Federal Acquisition Institute Tracking Application System and develop guidance to ensure the officer certification was consistently tracked.
The Aug. 3 report said that FAS had yet to require its regional offices complete spreadsheets detailing certification information.
“As a result, there is no assurance that: (1) all contracts assigned to CORs are identified in the COR Spreadsheet; (2) CORs are registered in FAITAS; and (3) the FAS Office of Acquisition Management can properly track and identify all CORs and their contract assignments, contract dollars and the date of the Delegation Letter,” the report said.
The OIG said that the FAS still hadn’t set up a recommended policy that would require the service to notify it of workload assignment changes 15 days after the end of the quarter.
As a result, the OIG said that officials must now submit an action plan about the open recommendations within 30 days.
*This story has been corrected to properly identify contracting officer representatives as the focus of the IG report. We regret the error.
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