Boof

July 31? Sounds like your POP has already expired. Why not issue a new call?

I hit my level of incompetance at Part 25. I have read it for years, taken a formal class, taken continuous learning modules, and asked coworkers. I still do not have the big picture on it and rely on my legal office to interpret the finer details.

Sounds nice but almost impossible to implement.

Incremental funding within fiscal year is far from rare in my agency. While severable services can be ended if funds run out, many of the more high value, complicated, overseas service contracts have huge demobilization costs that are rarely funded or obligated in the incremental funding. This leaves contracting vulnerable to the Anti-deficiency Act.

The purpose of awarding IDIQ contracts is to have a pool of qualified contractors that can quickly meet requirements using streamlined procedures. Over the years the services procured on IDIQ contracts became high dollar and extremely complicated. So the FAR was changed to allow debriefings and GAO protests for the higher value projects. However, the idea is to keep the small dollar projects streamlined with reduced documentation. My experience has been that with all the contractors being awarded as the most qualified in a competitive solicitation, most small, uncomplicated projects come down to a low price shootout.

We are ensuring they do not charge any fee but it appears we are on the hook otherwise. No comment about our competency other than to say we face chaos everyday and somehow meet the mission. Looking to the future only depresses you more. Thanks all.

Because the base contract is an IDIQ contract it has four inspection clauses listed in reference. 52.246-3, -4, -5, and -6. The task order has a lot more services than this construction project. The construction was added by mod. due to what they thought was urgency. Now its incomplete and tied up for months - so much for urgency. It should have been done as a fixed price construction contract in the first place but I had nothing to do with the original award.

In a CPFF contract the Government assumes cost risk but isn't there a way to hold the contractor responsible for incompetent work. I thought I read somewhere that the Government takes on the cost risk but not the technical risk for performance. However, everything I can find says we are on the hook since someone was not wise enough to award this as a fixed price contract. The SOW required the building to be built to international building code. The building was not built to that code structurally or electrically. The Government did not accept the building. The Government paid the prime for 5 construction managers throughout the construction period who apparently did not enforce the contract terms with the sub-contractor. We asked the prime contractor to provide a proposal to bring the building up to code and they are charging for almost everything over again citing it was a clearly a CPFF contract and ducking any responsibility for the poor performance. It just don't seem right that they are not responsible for some of these costs.

This has been an issue for years. Your company is the contract holder so we can only award to your company on your DUNS (or CAGE) number. Payment comes to you. We will list your reseller in the item header so you know who sold us. How you pay your reseller back is between the two of you. This would only seem to make sense since the reseller does not hold the contract. even if they have a FSS contract, they must have your product on it. GSA has disagreed with us before but then backed off when taking a closer look at the issue. They have never fixed the problem though. If the reseller has your product on his schedule then of course we will award directly to him.

I would just ask the contractor if he will accept a zero dollar option modification that places him on standby for a year or until the funds become available provided he does not charge any demobilization or remobilization costs. He will probably agree in order to retain the rights to the FY15 work should they get the funds. If he demands to be paid for costs then it is up to the program office whether to pay them or let the task order expire and recompete later. Issue a bilateral mod.

Right. That is why they pay $2.21 an hour less benefits than the employer who is not providing coverage.

FAR 16.504© is a preference for multiple awards and you can justify going with one. I would do everything I could to justify a single award and sole source it. Why create a ton of work, task order competitions, protests of task order awards and all the other problems my office has had with multiple awards if you don't absolutely have to. One caveat is that the work has to be able to be priced up front via a menu of fixed unit prices. If it can't then the competitions may be a lesser evil than justifying the fair and reasonable price on a sole source award. You actually have to justify to SBA why you want to compete a 8a for $4M. It is supposed to be accepted as a sole source.

May this die a quiet death in committee. Section 503 is an interesting idea but Section 502 will cause more reporting which is what is ruining the career field and keeping us from doing good contracting.

See 8.405-2 ©(4). The ordering activity shall provide the RFQ ....,,,,,to any schedule contractor who requests a copy of it.

Our agency got hit with a little over 2% of the $85B which put with other restraints such as the continuing resolution equates to 5% less than we said we needed for the FY. Notices were sent out to say they doubted any furloughs would occur before June and exempted some personnel. They also seem to think there is flexibility in where cuts can be made. I am glad this is so but I don't understand how the same cut across the board mandate has suddenly become flexible. P.S. Could I take my furlough days the last two weeks of September please. haha.

Read the task order/underlying contract. If this is not addressed you will have a hard time not paying on all 60 hours as that is what the company and workers probably expect. I realize that Government Workers only get it for the first 40 (unless that got changed recently) but those rules don't apply to the contract unless it is so stated.

It is up to the contractor to prove his right to an adjustment. He should be able to show pay statements with the H&W benefit (cash paid) before and after the SCA change. If he can't then I think you should be able to just deny the request.

You have lost me on this one - If the company was large at the time the contract was awarded how could they be an 8(a) contractor.

This debate happens all the time at my agency. We try to find a suitable IDIQ and some are pretty darn close but either the requesting program office finds some small detail that they insist deserves a new IDIQ just for them. Or else the Program office that requested the awarded IDIQ insists they want no one else using their contract because the new program office may confuse the contractor about quality control or other processes that they have him accustomed. Plus it will eat up the ceiling and cause them an earlier recompete. We have level of service agreements that require we keep our program offices satisfied so we usually just conduct a new solicitation.

Brian, Cutting task orders against IDIQ contracts used to be easy and safe. Now that they can be protested they are neither. I find it almost as difficult as doing a full and open. But beyond my griping about the award process, every new task order requires the awardee to have a program office with a program manager and staff. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and other not so nice places this gets very expensive. So you try to avoid multiple offices by using the follow on card (J&A)as much as possible.

I read several of the articles and it made my head hurt. And I still don't understand it. Maybe I am dense but I probably need a sample SOW/PWS and a sample pricing structure to get it.

You are correct. GSA has already awarded a contract with terms and conditions in it. You only add clauses to your solicitation/BPA if they are not in the contract, are needed to protect the Government and the GSA contracting officer does not have any objections to the clauses being added. This should be a rare occurance. Most of my GSA BPAs were just the three pages shown at the GSA website although one had several pages of administrative and logistical information but no real clauses. Don't make schedule buying any harder than you have to.

This is only a draft RFP so it don't matter. He wanted industry to point stuff like this out so it can be addressed in the final RFP. At lease I hope that was why they did it.

Our OIG wants our CORs to perform a full audit on all invoices before they approve them for payment down to the point of reviewing every time card for signatures. They also want us to make sure every receipt of property has been cosigned by a Government employee and then they brought up the archaic requirement to have boarding passes for every travel. We have been wasting lots of time pushing back by informing them that incurred cost audits catch mis-billings but they are sticking to thier guns and insisting we make SOPs that conform to thier thinking. So much for quick payment. DCAA told me that they have short list of things they quickly check before payment and use the incurred cost audits. They also said they have a constant battle with the DoD OIG about not intensifying pre-payment reviews.

I say let sequestration happen as long as it is truely an 8.x% cut on everybody and every program. We have to get the budget under control somehow and Congress can't seem to find a way other than across the board. I will enjoy my month of furlough this summer knowing I did my part for the debt reduction while visiting my grandkids. However, I don't want to lose my money if everyone isn't feeling the pain an equal amount. I suspect Congress will come up with some last minute plan that penalizes us FEDS more and bails out the big money special interests. Everyone has been living above their means for a long time even if they didn't realize it and unfortunately balancing the budget is going to hurt a lot more than this before it is complete.