Move Over FCMD Make Way for FAPIIS

Federal contracting officials will soon have a new tool at their disposal to help them track the performance and integrity of contractors.

The government moved a step closer toward developing its long-awaited contractor / grantee responsibility database – which has been given the catchy name “Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System” (FAPIIS) – when it published this proposed rule in the Federal Register.

The rule would implement Section 872 of the 2009 National Defense Authorization Act, which directs the General Services Administration (GSA) to establish a database of information pertaining to the integrity and performance of federal contractors and grantees. The public is invited to comment on how the GSA should develop and manage the system and collect data relating to criminal, civil and administrative proceedings involving contractors’ violations of federal, state or local laws or contracts.

FAPIIS will be similar in principle to POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), except it will include a much narrower range of misbehavior and only cover the most recent five-year period (it will archive all data for one additional year “to allow an audit trail”). What has POGO most concerned, however, is that FAPIIS will be off-limits to the public. On the plus side, FAPIIS will keep track of far more contractors than the FCMD, which currently includes 130 entities. The GSA estimates about 5,000 contractors will enter data into FAPIIS each year.

The reporting requirement is triggered on solicitations exceeding $500,000 if the contractor has federal contracts and grants worth more than $10 million. The Defense Authorization Act is silent on this point, but the proposed rule interprets contract and grant value to mean the value at the time of their award. Given the way some federal contracts skyrocket in value after they are awarded, POGO wonders if the Federal Acquisition Regulatory (FAR) Council’s interpretation might unduly limit the number of contractors that are entered into the database. For the big players who earn billions in revenue from the government each year, this obviously won’t make a difference. Smaller contractors, however, could fall through the cracks. POGO thinks the $10 million threshold requirement should apply to the present value of all contracts and grants.

POGO sees another potential problem in the way FAPIIS will draw data from existing government databases, namely the Excluded Parties List System (EPLS) and the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS). If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you know that EPLS and PPIRS are beset with problems that cast doubt on their functionality and reliability. For instance, the Government Accountability Office found that contracting officials are sometimes not aware that certain individuals or companies are listed in EPLS due to a flawed search system. Some suspended and debarred contractors are entered into EPLS without a unique identifying number, requiring users to search by name. This imprecise method invariably misses nicknames, aliases, or corporate name changes.

David Drabkin, GSA’s deputy associate administrator for acquisition policy, recently admitted to Government Executive the shortcomings of EPLS and PPIRS. “I think we agree as a community across the government that we have not been as diligent as we possibly could have been in terms of populating those databases with past performance information,” Drabkin said. He added that the "paucity of data in the system has led people not to use the system as much as they might have." Nonetheless, GSA reportedly will award a contract in the next few weeks to help the agency manage and/or merge the nine contracting-related databases, including EPLS and PPIRS, that make up its Integrated Acquisition Environment. Will FAPIIS fall victim to the same flaws that plague the government’s existing contracting databases?

POGO would like to share our ideas and concerns with the FAR Council by submitting a public comment to the proposed rule before the October 5 deadline. Can you think of other issues that we should address in our comment?

-- Neil Gordon

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[Chris Parker]

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