OFPP seeks 'aggressive goals' for agency contractor reviews

In the final quarter of 2012, Defense Department officials entered 67.5 percent of their required contractor reviews into the Past Performance Information Retrieval System. That’s a 1.5 percent improvement over the previous quarter, but it soon may not be good enough.

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy intends to recommend 100 percent compliance by fiscal 2015, Richard Ginman, director of defense procurement and acquisition policy at DOD, wrote in a Jan. 28 memo.

"We are currently looking into setting aggressive goals in this area,” OFPP Administrator Joe Jordan told FCW. "We believe procurement officials across the U.S. government should use past performance data to build the right supplier relationships to deliver better outcomes and efficiencies for the American people."

Contracting officers are supposed to take stock of how a company performed on a contract and then upload the review into PPIRS. The database gives a history for other agencies to assess whether a company has done quality work for the government.

Among defense agencies and military departments, only four surpassed 80 percent compliance: the Air Force; the Defense Logistics Agency; and Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The Defense Human Resources Activity reached 91 percent, but overall, Ginman wrote, DOD "must improve the completion of contractor performance assessments."