DoD has improved its oversight of energy saving performance contracts in response to GAO and IG reports but more needs to be done to assure that the department is getting the savings being claimed, an audit has said.
Such contracts allow agencies to procure energy savings and facility improvements with no upfront capital costs or special appropriations from Congress. An energy services contractor designs, finances, acquires, installs, and maintains the equipment and systems for the agency, which is to verify the claimed savings to assure that its payments to the contractor for them are supported.
However, starting 2013 the DoD IG and GAO had issued a series of reports concluding that DoD was falling short in assessing whether it had achieved the claimed savings and thus could not tell whether the program was cost effective. The latest audit found that the department has taken action on 62 of the collective 70 recommendations in those reports, which “resulted in improved oversight.”
Based on those actions, the IG recommended several changes that would help close out the pending recommendations and recommended that the Air Force scrutinize certain contracts that had not been subject to validation.
