Boof

I always supplied a breakdown spreadsheet and required the build up to make future modifications easier and to use the FAR Clause formulas in the case of labor under the Service Contract Act. Without knowing what the base year wages/benefits and other mark ups were, it was a lot harder to negotiate the new billing rates for SCA wage changes. In several years of doing it, I never had a complaint nor did anyone bring up market pricing. For high skilled professional services I also wanted to know how much was going to wages/benefits and how much to overhead and profit. A vendor may propose low wages and high overheads that lead to high employee turnover. Another vendor has higher wages and low overheads but about the same billing rate. I would rather the worker get the money for reduced turnover and higher morale then pay high indirect costs from the corporation not staying lean and mean. I know we are taught that we should not care about a contractors turn over as that is his problem but when hiring for complicated professional services the Government is the one hurt by high turnover. So you really want to know what the compensation plan for the employees will be.

Our last 1105s and 1106s were converted to 1102's for the pay reason. In Washington we could not get anyone any good at the paygrades of an 1105 and 1106 (Typically GS 5 to 9). Those we had that were good wanted to get above GS-9 and could not. They would move to the program offices that had higher grades. The pay grades have all escalated because the pay has not gone up enough within the grades. Now the "journeyman" (4 to 8 years) is a GS13 and looking to be a GS14 very soon. You must have 4 years to get your level III certification and many new personnel expect an unlimited warrant and a GS14 to come with that certification. A world of unrealistic expectation and yet many get it so it is not unrealistic anymore. I had a fast rise after a military career so I can not complain too much. It is good times for the staff but not so good for the organization. It used to be only Division Directors were GS15 but now we have Branch Chiefs and in some cases independent COs as GS15. I have relatives in the midwest that would die to get a steady $50K a year job but inside the beltway you feel unwanted if you don't make six figures.

Boy you are going into my ancient history. Actually I am TDY in Frankfurt this month. yes there are a lot of speed limits now compared to 1984 to 1987 when I was with the Air Force at Ramstein. I think the A63 from Mainz to KTown is still pretty unrestricted.

The logic to an Interagency Agreement (IAA) with DCAA is that they have staff permanently assigned to large corporations. They are familiar with that firm and its accounting procedures. They are often in the corporate space and thus there are no travel costs. One of our largest contractors has 35 DCAA auditors in thier HQ. Now our contracted auditors will have to travel and learn thier accounting processes from the bottom up. Thier decisions are likely to vary from what the company has done to satisfy DCAA. It is more cost effective to pay DCAA to do the audits even if they have to hire personnel with our funding.

USU1914, If you are using FAR Part 8 (GSA FSS) then FAR Part 13 does not apply. If you are using FAR Part 8 then FAR Part 13.5 don't apply either. SAT is $150K. FAR 13.5 only allows use of simplified procedures, it does not raise the SAT. Follow the only the rules in FAR Part 8 if awarding against GSA FSS. A GSA BPA cannot be walked away from as easily as a regular BPA because the contractor agreed to using BPAs in thier GSA FSS contract. Once a "call" is issued against the BPA, it is binding. In my mind a GSA BPA is not a "real" BPA. GSA just decided to call them that. I personnally would not use FAR Part 13 BPAs the way I see a lot of offices doing it. BPAs were meant for purchases under the Micro purchase threshold prior to Purchase Cards taking over. If I were awarding the possibility of millions of dollars, I would use an IDIQ contract so that the parties cannot just walk away. I have seen DoD and others awarding BPAs with each "call" being over a million dollars. I cringe.

I had no doubt that a protest would be filed. It was just a matter of what angle the lawyers would take in attacking the award. I am sure both teams had several different scenarios drafted up before the award was even announced. The stockholders expect nothing less when $50 to $80B is involved. With a guestimate of 5 to 8B in profit involved you can hire a lot of top notch lawyers.

Stopping us from using DCAA for audits is causing a mess. The original House version last spring allowed a year transition. The version put together in July states that DCAA must stop work for civilian agencies immediately upon the president signing the law. DCAA put us on notice that they will suspend our audits immediately. This means we have wasted a lot of money on unfinished audits some of which may be a week or two from completion. Plus we will have to jump through hoops to contract out our audits. The rush will almost ensure we do a poor job of contracting the services. Then multiply that by several different agencies who currently use DCAA on a reimbursable basis. How kicking us out and removing our funding will help DCAA catch up a backlog is illogical.

Meteec, I cut and past the matrix off the official FAR site into an Excel Spreadsheet and then I have filters and can sort. Problem is that it gets out of date quickly. I was actually surprised that it dropped into excel so easily with few adjustments needed. Be nice if they put it on the FAR site already in a spreadsheet with filters. Easy to do now we have graduated from paper.

Lots of agency specific rules on purchase cards. At Department of State you must have 40 additional hours of training in order to have a purchase card from $3,500 to $25,000 per purchase. Only a few COs have cards above $25K. All card purchases must have a PR generated in our purchase request system just as if they were going to procurment. Over $3,500 must have a contract or purchase order awarded under normal FAR procedures so that in reality the card becomes a payment method. We have payment cards issued for higher thresholds that are only used for reoccuring charges like cell phone usage, or utility bills. They pay specific bills but cannot be used for purchases. So make sure of the rules at your agency.

Try customercare@asigovt.com. I am sure they would like to sell more licenses.

Sorry for the delay in responding, we are very busy. Thanks for the advice and yes we could use brand name or equal but since we already have the J&As approved we will avoid having to evaluate any "equal" proposals that the program office already knows won't meet thier requirements. We probably would not get any but why chance it since we already have the J&As.

Vern, I see your point about our buying a brand name armored vehicle not making an "armoring contract". Seeing it in that light, we need the J&As. I was hung up on our IDIQ armoring contracts which I found out this morning have expired. So we are posting the two requirements as small business set asides. We know at least 3 of our previous IDIQ contractors will be making proposals. We have never had any major issues with the warranties but having a OEM warranty that will be honored when using dirty diesel was one of several reasons for limiting the competition. Thanks for getting my thinking straight.

We are soliciting armoring companies (full and open I think, unless we still have the IDIQ contract we used to have) to purchase and armor a specific brand of vehicle. The J&A states it is the only known vehicle of its passenger capacity that has right hand drive and runs on dirty diesel overseas. All of the vehicles will be shipped overseas after being armored. If the J&A is necessary then I would think a copy of it would go to the winning armorer to justify his sub-contract.

I need to piggyback on this topic. Vern in Post #10 stated he did not think the FAR required a J&A to direct a specific brand equipment in a construction contract. My situation is vehicle armoring. We plan to compete an armoring contract but direct the Armorer to use a specific Make and model vehicle. (note: GSA already waived Auto Choice). We have a split camp over whether a Brand Name J&A is required and what we do with it once approved. I have heard for my entire career that you can direct a prime to a sole source/brand name subcontract without a J&A but I am not sure why the FAR would allow us to avoid normal CICA procedures by using an intermediary to make the purchases. Does anyone know of anything I don't?

Yes, it really depends on what the original protest is about, the odds of it being successful and how this deficiency would affect it once the contractor's attorneys get the rule 4 file. I know my legal and if the procurement wasn't performed well, they make us re-evaluate.

Past Performance evaluation is a mine field. It would appear to be the most or nearly the most protested evaluation criteria in the last few years. Why? Because it is unfair to contractors many times and is subjective which allows contractors to attack its accuracy. My office constantly debates performance with our CORs. The COR wants to rate $500M in work marginal because of one or two inaccurate invoices. Most of these get upgraded but not always, depends on the CO. The contractor gets to provide his comments and ask for a review. But the orginal bad report is still on file when it goes to PPIRS with the comments of the contractor and the Reviewer. So now what do you do with this report as an evaluator. You call them. They all stick to thier stories. Who do you believe? Once again subjective and depends on the point of view point of the evaluator. One of our large contractors said they may go to court to insist that revised reports not show the original bad information. They know that when they complain to the Reviewer (Division Chief usually) he would remove the bad report and replace it with a good one to avoid conflict if the system let him. Wrong but true. OMB has suggested we should use Yelp, Angies list, Google, etc but guess what, they are starting to get law suits for inaccurate reports too. In the Government we have to give the contractor a chance to respond to bad information. Most of the COs I talk to find using this information to be too risky. Then you have the huge corporations that have some great reports and some terrible reports. It depends on the Progam Manager they had available at the time and the viewpoint of the COR. While a small company with a bad report might indicate they would fail again, a bad report on one the large Beltway Bandits means nothing in my opinion. With hundreds of contracts and Billions in Government revenue there is bound to be a few bad ones and little incentive to exceed satisfactory on the rest. Higher ratings equal less profit. Even CPARs states that exceeding Satisfactory may be impossible in some contracts. So to finish my diatribe, while past performace sounds like a great evaluation factor, if is frought with dangers. I believe that if the contractor was not so bad that they are in FAPIIS or debarred, we may want to keep them on a level playing field. The past performance information is just too inaccurate and I don't see any great improvement soon. When you use the information, you better dig deep and document, document, document. While the neighbors opinion of car dealers may influence you and not cause a issue, we are using taxpayer dollars and must base our evaluations on facts and not just opinions. Just the opinion of an old battle weary CO fighting in the trenches.

I don't think I would want that shoddy workmanship going to a GAO decision. I am pretty sure my legal staff would tell the GAO that we are taking corrective action and I would be told to reopen the competition and re-evaluate the proposals. Depending on what else was in the protest and where the protester stood, we might even open discussions and allow proposal revisions to correct the deficiencies.

Back to the orginal question about VAO. We bought a subscription for all our CO/CS and contract hire contract specialists (265). Some use it a lot and some very little . It has great checklists for ensuring specialists do not forget anything they need to do before award. In fact the checklists are so inclusive that our personnel cannot believe they are supposed to verify and justify so many items before award. I want to mandate their use but the director is not comfortable with doing that yet. VAO has pulled the best templates and document samples from across the Government and can save a specialist a lot of time if they are inexperienced in writing many of our myriad of decision documents. They have very well written reports and analysis of current policies, procedures and recent FAR changes. As part of the subscription they will research up to 3 hours on any topic you ask them to report on. If it is something they think has broad applicability, they will do a full research paper on it and publish for all. They also publish all questions asked. VAO really helps as an outsourced resource for management and procedure assistance. The webinars and training are accurate but they are one hour snipets. They also allow personnel to answer quizes on current changes for CLPS. The questions are hard so they are not give aways. YOu can gain valuable CLPs that way though. I am level III already so any CLP is a good CLP in my book. Their subscriptions are by organization with a basic cost for the hookup and set number of licenses. Added licenses are lower in cost. Pricing is off a Library of Congress contract that we award delivery orders against. They also have a lower cost COR Toolkit with just the items CORs need. We have about 800 CORs licensed. I don't think they have a way to buy just one license at a reasonable cost but they may. You need to contact them directly.

And with all the complications in contracting, the playbook will just lead them to make even dumber mistakes. Pick the wrong play and you get sacked.

Vern, What do you find wrong about my paragraph one. I agree making the orders via Mod is unusual but I don't think we could ever get the contract writing system to award a delivery order against another delivery order. I was also not considering the order to exceed $103M.

Whynot, Lets see how this works in an oversimplified example. Lets say you have four multiple award IDIQ contracts for various training classes. You have a requirement for one of the classes to be given multple times but at this point you know four dates/locations but do not know exactly how many more or where. So you would write a requirement (SOW, PWS, whatever) that states the known classes and approximately how many additional and provide it to the contractor(s) as a task order request (TOR). Then you would use fair opportunity to provide the TOR to one or more of the contractors awarded the IDIQ contracts. This could be by allowing all of them to compete for the task order or by justifying one of the execeptions to fair opportunity. Placing an order against an order is problematic so I would just use modifications to order up the maximum that was stated in the original TOR. Does this reflect what you are trying to do? If not, what did you mean? I remember back in the good old days where none of this was necessary. Contractors could not protest the fair opportunity decisions of the CO so we could just award the known requirement and then award the additional work the same way when another requirement came up. It only took a few days to get a new proposal and award a new task order. Quick and easy is why IDIQ contracts were created. But people messed up on some huge delivery orders and the contractors earned protest rights. Now every requirement takes as long as a full and open competition and is just as complicated due to legal, Small business office, OIG, GAO and others all getting involved to ensure "fair opportunity". This usually means allowing all to propose. So what do we do - we combine the known and unknown requirements into one task order so that we don't have to go through that task order award pain again.

Don, At Department of State we consider BPA orders to GSA FSS contracts to be "calls" and use Letter L in the document number (BPA Call). A BPA under the GSA FSS is awarded on letter A (BPA award). So therefore a order against the BPA is a "call" against the BPA number with the GSA contract number only referenced in the order header. Been done this way for at least 10 years and probably much longer.

Don, Sorry I have been on two weeks leave. It is our legal office that told us to not try and fight the protests. This was based on previous decisions that indicated GAO was going to agree with SBA that overseas was not exempt. We are writing briefings to try and sway SBA and OFPP that setting aside at our overseas posts is not economical or efficient. I personally have little confidence that will get a positive result but our Small Business Office and Procurment Executive are trying.

Hmmm. Parked for use at their discretion and then they could not find a use for it.. Maybe some ethics handbooks would have came in handy. Oh well, our vets lost a little services and the taxpayers won a little if the funds were not used and no longer available.

I work at Department of State. We are getting one protest after another from Latvian Connection. When we do, we withdraw the solicitation and set it aside for American Small Business under FAR Part 19 unless it can only be performed by a local company cost effectively. Then we have to write a justification to file as to why it is dumb to buy from the U.S. A massive training program for our General Service Officers worldwide in the coming months to train them on FAR 19 which they have never had to deal with before. (They have 1 week of procurement training and $250K warrants) Even our Regional Office in Frankfurt has little knowledge of FAR 19. I have been to several meetings with SBA who are pushing for a FAR change because they say the FAR violates the public law which never exempted overseas purchases. Beginning October 1, 2015, SBA plans to count all agency dollars into the small business percentages without an exemption for overseas which will drop many agencies considerably. State expects to have our percentage drop 19% to barely over the Governmentwide 23% but unable to meet any subgoals. DoD, State and other agencies provided our negative impacts to SBA and suggested a much longer implementation period but their minds seem made up. The law is the law and it had no exemptions for overseas is thier point of view.