Agency purchases on goods and services through the General
Services Administration’s “multiple award schedule” program
rose from $4 to $32 billion in the last ten years, but
weaknesses in the agency’s contract analysis prevent it
from knowing if it gets the best price from vendors, the
Government Accountability Office has said.
It said GSA analyzes information provided by vendors on
discounts for other customers and recent sales data for
similar items, but in the past “GSA has not always used
pricing tools effectively,” and management controls to
ensure good pricing had been reduced.
Contract negotiators at four MAS acquisition centers use
a range of tools to get the best prices from vendors, but
GSA lacks the documentation needed to determine if the
prices were effectively negotiated on 60 percent of the
contracts for fiscal 2004, according to GAO-05-229.
It said the documentation was not enough to determine if
“negotiated prices were based on accurate, complete, and
current vendor information; adequate price analyses; and
reasonable price negotiations.”
One reason is that GSA has cut back on the use of audits
before and after a contract, on pricing information before
the contract was awarded, said GAO, adding that the tools
have helped GSA avoid or recover hundreds of millions in
the past but have dropped in usage from 154 in 1995 to 40
in 2004.
It said that in March of 2003, GSA’s acquisition quality
management measurement and improvement program started
the use of panels to negotiate prices for contracts and
review them for quality after awards were made, but that
these efforts have suffered from insufficient oversight.
For example, three of the MAS acquisition centers had
not reported results of their 2003 pre-negotiation panels,
which management needs to fix problems – one center that
accounted for 56 percent of fiscal 2004 sales has not
held a single pre-negotiation panel to secure the best
prices, and while the post-award quality reviews have
identified problems in contract documentation, they
failed to determine the cause, according to GAO.
