The Government Accountability Office has said better performance measures and management of the Department of Energy’s contract award process is needed to address delays in contract awards.
It said several recent contracts have taken much longer than anticipated to award, but associated cost increases are unknown because DoE doesn’t track them for the agency or for contractors.
DoE is the largest civilian-contracting agency and spends over 90 percent of its budget on contracts to operate its facilities and carry out its diverse missions, according to GAO-06-722.
It said that in fiscal 2002 through 2005, the agency awarded 131 contracts valued at $5 million or greater, and that none of 24 contracts awarded competitively was awarded by the date planned in DOE’s schedule, with 23 of the contracts awarded between several weeks and 4.5 years later than the planned date.
Delays resulted when DoE modified its approach after beginning the contract award process, GAO said.
It said that until recently, the agency had not been addressing delays in awarding contracts because incomplete performance data indicated that most of the contracts were awarded in a timely manner.
In 2005 DoE started trying to improve timeliness and began restructuring the Office of Environmental Management to strengthen management of the contracting process, GAO said.
It said however that those efforts do not encompass all of DOE’s contract awards and DOE does not have a systematic method of identifying and disseminating lessons learned and best practices.
