WifWaf

For perspective, BAH consistently falls in the top 25 of the Defense News Top 100 Defense Companies each year, with about 70% Defense revenue. Total revenues of $8.4B in 2021.

A whistleblower led DCAA and DOJ to allege under the False Claims Act that Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH): Allocated indirect costs that supported Booz Allen’s commercial and/or international businesses to Government contracts and subcontracts that should have been allocated to commercial and/or international contracts or should have been treated as unallowable costs…; Created and maintained indirect cost pools that included commingled costs supporting both (i) commercial and/or international contracts and (ii) Government contracts and subcontracts, and by virtue of such commingling allocated indirect costs disproportionately between commercial and/or international contracts and Government contracts and subcontracts, and thus were not in compliance with the CAS or FAR, including but not limited to the homogeneity and proportionality requirements in CAS 418 and the allocability requirements in FAR 31.201-4; Used costs and cost rates that included indirect costs supporting Booz Allen’s commercial and/or international businesses to seek inflated payments and reimbursements under its Government contracts and subcontracts, and failed to disclose current, accurate, and complete cost or pricing data related to such costs resulting in inflated prices for Government contracts and subcontracts; Submitted inaccurate and/or misleading statements (including but not limited to in its CAS Disclosure Statements) regarding the methods by which it accounted for, and the nature of, indirect costs supporting its commercial and/or international businesses; and Shifted employees and work relating to its commercial and/or international businesses between Responsibility Centers in violation of the requirements of the FAR and CAS, thereby creating and maintaining indirect cost pools that were not in compliance with FAR or CAS resulting in misallocations of indirect costs to government contracts. A9ciwbp5_sjmaca_bro.tmp (justice.gov) The resulting settlement was for $377,453,150 covering 10 years of alleged noncompliance. These allegations happen a lot at the DCMA Cost and Pricing Center in my experience, but they don't usually result in a settlement remotely close to this sum. Recommend DCAA auditors and DCMA Cost Monitors examine their audit report findings for similar allegations, and coordinate with the BAH CACOs and DACOs to learn the details of why this case worked out in the Government's favor. veritas numquam perit

“This report concludes that the Department does not find a need to modify its weighted guidelines structured methodology of arriving at objective profit positions for negotiation.” I guess this report could go in the What Happened forum series concerning this thread:

This is FAR 15.406-3, "Documenting the negotiation." See also: 15.404-1, "Proposal analysis techniques." Contract Pricing Reference Guides (dau.edu) These sound like commercial products and services, in which case your reprieve is you generally get to use price analysis instead of cost analysis. Again, my responses here are focused on what happens after you've competed your subcontract.

Having been through the ringer last decade trying (from the DCMA side) to get a contractor's disapproved purchasing system to meet an acceptable corrective action plan, I suggest you answer your question 1 by writing a handbook section that lays out your company's thinking on the matter - and then be done with it. In this way treat practicality like reasonableness, which is defined at FAR 31.201-3 with two succinct theoretical paragraphs that beg the practitioner to justify his/her actual practice with a memo that points back at this theory. The memo simply has to make objective sense applying theory to the instant facts and circumstances. With that done and over with, you really need to focus on the DFARS criteria surrounding your question 2. I would be highly concerned about the CPSR team judging the adequacy of your cost and price analyses. These are always where talks with my contractor broke down. I will provide you a sample corrective action request from a document I kept, below. Study very hard what is, in your market, an "adequate" cost analysis if you want to avoid being disapproved on these grounds:

@ContractJockey Know your sources... That one is stealing, apparently foreign, and sounds robotic. I will foot-stomp:

Mr. Edwards, I am reminded of you in nearly every enlightened book I read these days. For example, I thought of your contributions to this forum when recently rereading this passage from Haidt, Jonathan and Lukianoff, Greg: See The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press, 2018. Your contributions to the cause of scholarship here will be missed. Those of us that do not live by the whimsical, postmodern standards of the day are all going to have to step up and learn how to do this right, for truth's sake.

So when push comes to shove, and the lack of billets filled force this do-more-with-less ethos, the best managers should have previously learned and come up the ranks in their offices so well that they can navigate where best to start to skimp on enforcement - be it an obscure, agency-level regulation, or perhaps things OFPP issued and doesn’t enforce, e.g., Performance-Based Contracting and nonpersonal service language crafting in the PWS. There’s a list of all admin functions that DCMA supervisors could examine in FAR Part 42 and DFARS 242 but they’d have to know their office-level implementations of each function. Either way, my point is that this it is management’s role, not a practitioner’s role, to decide where to cut.

Thanks for your thoughtful openness, CO.

I am sure this is sarcasm but I would send your thanks right up the flag pole if it were real. You can instead thank the managers that assigned 200 contractors, which totaled nearly 2000 contracts or assistance instruments worth $2.5B, to a GS-12, and whom then had the audacity to track the approval of each business system though data metrics 4-6 levels above my supervisor. That sort of reasoning - "we have to satisfy our internal customers (PCOs)!" - becomes insanity as you scale its application up.

Or, were you told the world is a better place because you're in it. I am a Millennial and I am very curious about my peers' upbringings. Were you ever taught to put hard work into doing things, e.g., being right and moral, or were your caretakers and teachers assuming you were already a righteous and moral person that society was just waiting to corrupt, you think?

Lalala I don’t hear you 🙉 So anyway, I relied on market forces… Okay, in reality assumptions were made on my part to manage a 200-contractor workload. Not saying I was doing the taxpayer a great service, but we had to make risk-based decisions and approve some accounting systems without audit reports - or even any real knowledge of their rate structures!

This is where I was going to go once the thread was ripe for it. For DOD contracts meeting the prescription at DFARS 242.7503 - for example all CR/T&M contracts - ACOs must make the determination of a contractor's compliance with DFARS 252.242-7005(c) System Criteria. These criteria include, "(4) A logical and consistent method for the accumulation and allocation of indirect costs to intermediate and final cost objectives", and "(12) Exclusion from costs charged to Government contracts of amounts which are not allowable in terms of Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) part 31, Contract Cost Principles and Procedures, and other contract provisions," and, "(18) Accounting practices in accordance with standards promulgated by the Cost Accounting Standards Board, if applicable, otherwise, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles." The ACO's determination is based on a DCAA audit report usually. As a DCMA geographical ACO, I was always excited to have a commercially viable mid-size business in my portfolio, because I could trust market forces to appropriate its indirect cost rate structure. Once many contractors got large and savvy enough though, new OH pools come out of the woodwork for their government-only business. As a rule of thumb we are to be permissive in assessing the structure (others have alluded to this permissiveness above), so unless I knew their commercial lines well, I would have to dedicate much time to figuring out if the government line, under monopsony conditions, was being treated the same as the commercial line, under free market conditions. An example of this difficulty might be, IAW one of the System Criteria quoted above, figuring out if the government line is compliant with FAR 31.203(b), which requires, "No final cost objective shall have allocated to it as an indirect cost any cost, if other costs incurred for the same purpose, in like circumstances, have been included as a direct cost of that or any other final cost objective." What do I (or even the auditor for that matter) know about the "purpose" of costs incurred for their commercial work?

Video I was describing watching was just a voiceover of Mr. Sowell talking while the uploader doodled to illustrate the speech. It's the format that many education-minded YouTube accounts ascribe to. Deepfakes need not be developed for these videos to be manipulated - only voice robbing A.I. is necessary. That technology is already used widely. Viewer beware of your sources.

Taking my tin foil hat off for this post, I return to something I learned from a book about curiosity that @Vern Edwards recommended in this forum, which explained that, thanks to Google, most people think they can treat all their problems as puzzles, with a definite answer. These people fail to realize many problems they query Google to answer are actually mysteries, which require judgments be built upon judgments to arrive at a defensible, but uncertain, conclusion. In other words, they require the application of research. I don’t know about you, but I plan to strategically direct my career towards positions requiring research application to impress the boss, e.g., complex services or systems contracting. The puzzles of our career field will just be solved by A.I. someday anyway.