OMB directs agencies to improve contractor performance reporting

A memorandum released Wednesday by the Office of Management and Budget requires federal agencies to place a greater emphasis on reporting contractor performance.

The memo directed all agencies to submit performance data to a centralized database. OMB will monitor the process to ensure compliance.

The guidance was one of three memos released as part of what OMB officials said would be the first round of procurement reforms. A second series is scheduled to be released in September and will focus on "maximizing competition, choosing appropriate contract types, building the capacity of the federal acquisition workforce and clarifying when outsourcing is appropriate," OMB stated.

According to the memo, contracting officers must submit an electronic record of how well contractors fulfilled their responsibilities to the Past Performance Information Retrieval System, a governmentwide database created by the Naval Sea Logistics Center Detachment Portsmouth in July 2002. Agencies must keep performance data for all types of contracts that reach agency-specific price thresholds laid out in the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the memo stated.

Agencies already were required to report performance information for most contracts, but compliance and enforcement have been sporadic. An April report from the Government Accountability Office found only a small percentage of contracts during fiscal 2006 and 2007 had performance data entered in PPIRS. Reports for vendors on the General Services Administration supply schedules were especially scarce, the watchdog agency found. A final rule in the July 1 Federal Register addressed that issue by requiring agencies to use PPIRS to document contractor performance for all GSA Federal Supply Schedules program awards of more than $100,000.

Critics have said the data in PPIRS is not robust and the evaluations are not detailed enough to be useful. On Wednesday OMB Executive Associate Director Jeff Liebman said those criticisms were "on the mark" and that OMB is proactively measuring agency compliance with the reporting requirements.

Starting in February 2010, OMB will take random samples of the performance reports agencies file on PPIRS. Agencies will be evaluated on both submission of reports and the quality of information included. OMB will publish a selection of performance reports from each agency, but the public will not have access to the database.

"[The contractor performance database] is not public, it's for internal use," Liebman said. "The argument is that we get more thorough and honest assessments when something is for internal use."

OMB spokesman Tom Gavin said the administration would like to make as much of the information publicly available as possible and plans to "lean toward openness" as it has with other federal Web sites such IT Dashboard and Data.gov.

"That's certainly where our eyes will be as we move forward on the contractor database," Gavin said.

But Liebman said the agency has no plans yet to make the database public.