Federal agencies on average have awarded about 30 percent of their IT contract spending non-competitively, GAO has said, adding that for some other spending it could not determine whether competition had occurred due to unreliable data from the awarding agencies.
Of the nearly $60 billion in IT spending over the last five years at DHS, DoD and HHS, $12.8 billion was non-competitive and another $2.6 billion could not be determined, GSA said. DHS has identified underlying issues in its data and has taken corrective action but DoD and HHS have “limited insight” into why their errors occurred, it said.
Agencies said that the primary reasons for noncompetitive awards are that only one source could meet the need–for example, the contractor owned proprietary technical or data rights–and that the agency awarded the contract to a small business to help meet agency goals.
GAO further found that about 8 percent of the noncompetitive contracts in that time were “bridge” contracts issued to the same provider after the original contract had expired but before a new longer-term contract could be issued, while about 7 percent “were used to support outdated or obsolete legacy IT systems.”