Contractors' Past Performance

Inside the Pentagon reported this week that defense officials had marginally improved their reporting on the past performance of contractors, calling into question whether the Pentagon will be able to reach a target set by the White House for fiscal year 2014, according to a Defense Department memo:

As of Jan. 3, the DOD as a whole had achieved a compliance rate of 82 percent, an increase of 2 percent compared with the third quarter of FY-13, Richard Ginman, the Pentagon's director of defense procurement and acquisition policy, wrote in the Jan. 9 document. The data reflects the number of contracts for which officials have entered companies' performance information into the Past Performance Information Retrieval System. The data is supposed to influence subsequent DOD source-selection decisions.

The White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy's compliance goal for DOD is 95 percent in FY-14, according to Ginman's memo. "I commend those agencies that are making great efforts to improve their compliance," he wrote.

Among the services, the Navy made the greatest strides in improving contractor-performance reporting, achieving an increase of 4 percent compared with the last quarter of FY-13. The service's latest compliance rate was 85 percent. The Army and the Air Force inched up their numbers by 1 percent, arriving at rates of 78 percent and 87 percent, respectively.

We now have that memo. Click here to view it.