Most of the top 100 federal contractors have multiple instances of civil, criminal or administrative misconduct on their records, but one third have relatively clean records, the Project on Government Oversight has said after reviewing fiscal 2009 data on USASpending.gov that it uses to populate its contractor misconduct database.
POGO sent a letter to GSA recently requesting that it iron out some irregularities in the USASpending database, including "Government of the United States" being listed as a contractor, and subsidiaries of companies receiving separate listings from their parents.
However, it says the fact that over a quarter of the top contractors have clean records shows that misconduct doesn’t have to be tolerated as a cost of doing business.
According to POGO the top 100 contractors received over $296 billion in contracts in fiscal 2009, just over half of all awards for that year, and in the past 15 or so years they have accumulated 642 instances of misconduct and about $19 billion in penalties.