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Every now and working at the General Accounting
Office1 (GAO) was fun. Fun, in my view, was to be
given a task that others didn't think could be done and then doing
it.2
It was 1988, I had completed my MS in
Procurement Management in late 1987 and had just finished writing a
procurement course for GAO's Training Institute. My time in
the Training Institute was coming to an end and now it was time to
go to work. So, I visited with my Assistant Director (AD) to
find out what assignments3 were available. He
pulled out a 2-page letter from his desk and let me look at it.
It was a request from a congressional committee that wanted a report
about civilian agency contract administration. Needless to
say, It had failure written all over it. Plus, the request
letter was several months old. This led to the following
question and answer session between me and the AD.
Me: This request is already old.
Why didn't anybody do something with it?
AD: Your the only one who could do
it!
I suppose the AD really meant I was the only
one stupid enough to try it.
Shortly after I saw the letter and met with
the AD, we met with GAO management. Knowing nothing about
contracting, management explained there was a great deal of waste in
civilian agency contract administration. They wanted examples
of waste in dollar amounts. Since time is money, I asked if
wasted time was the equivalent of dollars. Fortunately for me,
they said yes. All I had to do was to show wasted money and
wasted time from a review of civilian agency contract
administration.
Since this report was instrumental in the
development of performance-based contracting, since I've always
found that its development and completion was amusing, and since my
memory of how I did it is fading, I thought now would be a good time
to write this article.
Below is how the work was conceived,
staffed, and completed. Some tidbits from the writing of the
report are included.
Selecting The Contracts
How does one fairly pick a contract that
will have performance problems after award?
The first thing that came to mind was to
give the contracting parties time to do the work, or if you prefer,
time for things to go wrong. One cannot pick a newly awarded
contract to identify problems in performance. On the other
hand, one cannot pick completed contracts. If you do, any
problems identified in the report will be ancient history. So,
here was the compromise: contracts with at least 2 years of
performance and contracts that were not closed out. The
contracts would be selected from a contracting offices list of
contracts instead of using the
1 Sometime after the
issuance of this report, the General Accounting Office was renamed
the Government Accountability Office so that people would better
know what it did. I never did any accounting in my career, so
I didn't really mind. However, I had a grand time figuring out
what GAO's employees should be called. My favorite term was "accountabilist"
since I felt it was as mindless as the agency's name change.
2 Of course, doing
something simplistic and packaging it beautifully was fun too.
3 That was GAO lingo for
finite work, which if successful, would end up in a report.
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