here_2_help

Vern,

I see nothing in your words to disagree with. Too many CM articles are too clearly sales jobs.

Not sure if your final sentence was directed at me, or not. In case it was, let me say that I've contributed more than a handful of articles to CM in the past decade--one in the past 12 months. (Not under the name "Here_2_Help" obviously.) I hope I got the details correct.

When I write for CM I try to keep in the back of my mind that not all readers are FAR/DFARS experts. That's why my articles usually have extensive footnotes. The footnotes are for those (few) who want the details and the exact citations.

Again, Don is correct. Brian and Mark should have done better.

Happy New Year to all.

I am not in favor of mis-educating people who need to know the details and get them correct. The thing is, I don't believe Contract Management is the place to get the details correct. (Maybe it should be.)

The magazine has a wide circulation that includes commercial contract managers, subcontract managers, and many others. Perhaps the authors have provided sufficient education for those others? Maybe there is some learning to be had, even though some of the details are not correct?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending them. (And yes, I know both authors personally.) Wrong is wrong. When you hold yourself out as an expert, you need to get the details correct. And clearly they didn't.

But, seriously. What did you expect? It's Contract Management.

Don,

This is one of your better blog posts. The FAR Councils need to clear up confusion, in terms of both TINA and CAS administration. In particular, what is the contract award value of an ID/IQ with respect to CAS administration? The DCAA says it's the ID/IQ ceiling value but that's a puerile position, particularly when there are multiple ID/IQ awards being made. Will you be submitting a request to open a FAR Case?

Looks like the Court of Federal Claims agrees with you, Don. And Mission Critical Systems wins again.

"The court has examined the statutory language of the Small Business Act and concluded that the mandatory language of the HUBZone statute requires that a contracting officer first determine whether the specified criteria are met before awarding a contract under another small business program or on a sole-source basis."

Don,

In response to your questions.

1. Sure, go ahead and make that assumption. There are dozens or scores of assumptions that are already part of the impact analysis. What's one more? My point is, the process is so unwieldy that nearly everybody takes shortcuts. For example, the majority of cost impacts are not taken to the contract price level -- regardless of what the regs or the CAM says. Why? Too hard. Too hard to calculate, too hard to audit. Now, if somebody is alleging fraud, that's a different story. But for the run-of-the-mill voluntary change in cost accounting practice, the goal is to protect the government from paying increased costs "in the aggregate" more than it is to calculate the exact quantum of change, by contract, by contract type, by agency. So nearly everybody cuts corners, including the contractor, the auditors, and the CFAOs. They have to; it's too expensive and time-consuming to adhere to the straight and narrow methodology prescribed by CAS and FAR and CAM.

2. See my answer above. In practice, neither matter very much. As to why DCAA would differentiate the two, your guess is as good as mine. Why not ask 'em?

Don,

From my perspective, the cost impact process is complex enough as it already is without adding to the complexity. We have to try to ascertain what negotiated FFP prices would have been, had compliant practices been used (even when negotiation memoranda indicate a haircut taken at the bottom line. We have to ascertain what target and incentive fee ranges would have been. We have to look at EACs by program and often by individual task order. In the case of T&M contract types, FAR 30.602 says we have to bifurcate the contracts into their fixed and flexibly priced portions and calculate separate impacts. No sir, let us not add to the complexity of this already unwieldy process by trying to guess what AF pools would have been negotiated and apply the AF ratings to the new pools in order to make a guess at how much award fees were affected. No sir, thank you very much.

Look the underpinning of CAS is materiality. You cannot have a CAS noncompliance for an immaterial amount of costs. Given the process and dollars already involved, the AF deltas are immaterial or should be considered to be so.

Take it from me, the Government does NOT want to go there, unless you want to double the size of the DCAA audit staff.