formerfed

Joel’s advice is right on. Call the vendor and discuss fixes. In the larger scheme of things, this is nothing. A bad snow storm likely causes more disruption.

@govt2310 Good advice here. You did a micro purchase with no clauses. The vendors terms are silent on cancellation and sparse as you said. So the options are talk with the vendor and negotiate something mutually satisfactory or spend hours on research and likely involve senior people in your office as well as legal counsel spending a large amount of administrative time and expense.

I’ve seen this a couple times before with training vendors. They offer a bundle of courses packaged with a single commercial package price. It’s often for training on a suite of office software. The vendor is paid with a purchase card. Later the agency decides they don’t need all the courses at that time. The vendor offers a voucher for the remaining courses at no additional cost to be taken over the following year. The other choice is just excusing the contractor as you said.

FAR 13.201 (d) says this So if your purchase is silent on clauses the Christian Doctrine wouldn’t apply

This chart from GAO shows how frequent CRs occur in recent years CR frequency

This part of the quote really surprised me I didn’t pay attention to CRs until Ronald Reagan was President and there were shutdowns. There were lots of doubt about Federal employees being paid

When I was doing consulting work, the Project Management Institute was an excellent source for this type information. If someone in your company belongs, ask them for help. If not organization has lots of free information that might be of assistance. PMI

Exactly. My problem with some of the prior responses is the implication that cost or pricing data doesn’t add up to the proposed amount, including the profit. The bottom line is supporting the proposed amount to perform as well as allow a structured approach to analyze profit/fee. @Retreadfed I said what you’re saying is correct. Look a couple posts above. Again my point as a contracting officer is I would want it in something I could relate to anticipated cost of performance including profit. I’ve never had a contractor not provide it in that manner nor ever heard of that situation anywhere. Edit: I think the difference here is partially based on my not explaining my thought adequately. Suppose a proposal is based on 30 hours of labor but the cost or pricing data using historical experience uses 20 hours. As a contracting officer I expect the offeror to explain the assumptions used to arrive at 30 hours. This is also getting way off topic from the original question.

The reason I asked details about the contract is this situation happens occasionally. Sometimes it’s the governments preference. A common practice for some studies and analysis efforts as well as IT development is delivering a series of sequential products. This might include items like requirements definition, conceptual design, test plans, and draft reports. Sometimes the parties don’t like multiple invoicing and payments. Separate clins might be used but not always. But here_2_help probably hit upon a very good reason for the contractors reluctance and that’s not wanting to disclose a huge profit.

Certainly but you’re missing my point. What you’re saying is correct. My point is if an offeror didn’t submit data that clearly supports his proposed amount in an easily to understand format, I would ask them to resubmit. I also wouldn’t try to analyze myself.

What is the contract for? Supplies or services? Dollar value large or small? Since you mentioned “spend plan” it sounds like performance can be in increments. We just need more information. But a quick answer seems like “no, you can’t force them to submit progress payments if the contract doesn’t require it.” That doesn’t mean you can’t sit down and negotiate something though.

@Guardian, that’s exactly what I was saying. Maybe I should have used more detail.

A company proposes a price or costs. As a CO/KO I exhaust all the means to determine price/cost reasonableness so I resort to offeror submission of cost or pricing data and my analysis. I want the offeror to support their proposed amount. If the proposed amount is $20 and the offeror says their cost is $20, I expect them to show a 100% profit. I don’t care about anything else. What is their anticipated cost of performance and what is their data supporting that? What good is a bunch of other stuff? I would just tell them what I need and don’t waste both of our time. If I was negotiating I need to understand the offerors proposal. Unless data was submitted on the basis of the proposed amount, it’s difficult to determine reasonableness or come to agreement.

Right. Plus I will add as a contracting officer, if an offerors cost and pricing data including proposed profit/fee doesn’t add up with proposed prices, I would tell them to resubmit. This discussion is just making things way too difficult.

Certainly you can do two mods the way you described. I just am in the habit of minimizing the number of contract modifications when possible and try to consolidate actions.