FCW Insider: The craziest idea ever?

FCW reporter Matthew Weigelt passed on this nugget from a session today at fall conference of the Coalition for Government Procurement:

This may be the craziest idea ever: the General Services Administration Multiple Award Schedules contract’s retail price.

Steve Kelman, professor of public policy at Harvard University, Federal Computer Week columnist and former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, today proposed a new way of how a contractor would set its schedules price. The contractor would not simply give GSA its lowest price compared to some obscure customer in Idaho, which currently form the most favored customer price.

Instead, contractors would report on the sale price in their largest sales outlet, whether catalog or some means. Then the government would set the schedules price at that price and then add a standard discount, Kelman described in a speech at the Coalition for Government Procurement’s Fall Conference.

These most common sales prices would better match the real world, he said.

However by a show of hands, audience members, mainly contractors, indicated they thought Kelman’s idea was crazy.

Kelman himself described the idea as the possibly craziest idea ever

What do you think? Post a comment on this blog or send an e-mail to letters@fcw.com and we will post it for you.