Of agencies that have building leasing authority independent of GSA, the actions of almost half are not consistently tracked, raising questions about whether they are overpaying for space, GAO has said.
While GSA tracks and reports on its own leases, “less is known about the holdings of federal entities that independently lease real property,” GAO told a House hearing. That issue was recognized as far back as 2004 when an executive order created the Federal Real Property Council with the goals of developing guidance, facilitating the implementation of agencies’ asset management plans, and serving as a clearinghouse for leading practices, leading GSA to establish the Federal Real Property Profile database.
However, “neither GSA nor OMB maintains a comprehensive list of federal government entities with independent leasing authority, and neither is required to do so. FRPP offers a possible way for determining which agencies have independent leasing authority since the FRPP has a data field that indicates if a federal entity uses its own authority to lease real property. However, this information is incomplete as only agencies in the FRPC are required to annually submit their real property information to the FRPP,” a witness said.
Auditors surveyed 103 federal entities and found that 52 have independent leasing authority—but of those, 25 are not members of the FRPC. In total they leased 243 offices and warehouses covering approximately 8.3-million rentable square feet of space and costing $303 million in annual rent, GAO said.
In an examination of 37 leases across seven of those agencies, GAO found that 14 had rates less costly than matched GSA leases, 11 had comparable rates and 12 had rates that cost more.
Further, in a close look at eight of those agencies, GAO found that six had policies that generally aligned with leading government leasing practices but two did not have any documented leasing policies. Even among the six, “we found numerous instances where the lease files lacked evidence to support that the leading practices were actually used.”
