Pentagon official: GSA likely to pass contracting audit

A second round of Defense Department inspector general audits into contracting practices at the General Services Administration likely will deliver mostly positive results, a Defense official said Thursday.

The audits are required under a law Congress passed in the wake of contracting abuse scandals uncovered at GSA and other intergovernmental contracting operations. Last year, the Pentagon inspector general only reviewed GSA; the results, expressed in traffic-light score card terms, were mostly yellow - neither completely compliant with defense procurement requirements nor totally incompliant.

This year, GSA is likely to gain mostly green scores, "although I'm not sure if they're getting all greens," said Domenico Cipicchio, the Pentagon's acting director for defense procurement and acquisition policy, in a talk before an industry audience. Green results are important for GSA -- anything less means that the Pentagon would have to restrict orders placed to GSA's Client Support Centers to $100,000 or less.

The Defense inspector general also evaluated intergovernmental contracting shops at NASA and the Interior and Treasury departments. Those agencies "are mostly getting yellows," Cipicchio said. The Pentagon will "look at that to see if we need to make any changes and adjustments in our policy," he added.

The Pentagon also is reviewing its four-year-old service acquisition process. The department now spends more money annually on services than it does on equipment, Cipicchio said. As part of the fiscal 2002 Defense authorization act, Congress required a more disciplined approach to acquiring services.

The Government Accountability Office has included the Defense Department's contract management on its list of high-risk federal efforts since 1992. Partly because the Office of the Secretary of Defense lacks the requisite manpower, the Pentagon decided to delegate much of the oversight required by the 2002 law to the military branches, Cipicchio said.

A preliminary review of the services' practices shows they "are really doing some pretty smart things," he said.