GAO Finds DoD, HHS, DHS Misreporting Noncompetitive Contracts

The Government Accountability Office called on the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services to review their records of contract awards due to misreported noncompetitive contracts. 

Contracting officials at the DoD and HHS found misreporting competitive and noncompetitive between fiscal years 2013 and 2017, GAO said in a report posted Tuesday. 

“Federal data estimates 30 percent of IT spending is noncompetitive—or about $15B annually. However, this estimate may not be accurate,” the watchdog report stated.   

GAO said DoD, HHS and the Department of Homeland Security provided inaccurate competition data in the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. The errors were found in 22 of the 41 contracts reviewed. The watchdog also discovered that 7 percent of noncompetitive IT contracts and orders released by the three agencies in the past fiscal years were used to support outdated or obsolete legacy IT systems. GAO warned that misreporting contracts could lead to competition data being inaccurately recorded and misguides federal agencies in planning and achieving objectives.

\n\n

DHS has already identified issues that caused the errors and took corrective action. The DoD and HHS have yet to respond to GAO’s recommendations to determine the reasons behind the high rate of miscoding for contracts and to improve the reliability of the competition data.