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FederalDaily - July 29, 2005

Employee Sells Government Property on eBay

An employee at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico allegedly charged robotic dogs, iPods, laptop computers and other items to the federal government, then apparently resold them on eBay or kept them for personal use, according to a search warrant issued by the U.S. District Court of New Mexico this week. The search warrant was made public by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). According to the warrant, the employee “utilized the Internet auction site ‘Ebay’ to sell numerous electronic items…from 1999 through 2002.” Lab managers noticed that some of the employee’s purchases were missing in August 2004, prompting the lab to contact the Department of Energy Inspector General which is investigating the fraud. The search warrant lists 43 items or categories of items that inspectors are searching for. “The Department of Energy needs to assert stronger control over its spending at nuclear labs,” said Danielle Brian, POGO’s executive director.

Trouble Still Plagues FBI Language Program

The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) recently issued a report on the FBI’s foreign language program finding that the FBI could not translate all foreign language counterterrorism and counterintelligence material it collected. The OIG audit also found that the FBI had difficulty in filing its need for additional contract linguists. Further, the audit found that the FBI was not in full compliance with the standards it adopted for reviews of the work performed by newly hired linguists and annual reviews for permanent and contract linguists. “ I remain troubled by the fact that it takes the Bureau, on average, 16 months to hire a contract linguist,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., in response to the OIG report.

OMB Wins Award for Program Evaluations

The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) recently won the Innovations in American Government Award. The PART was one of six award winners. OMB uses the PART to assess every federal program’s management and results. Half of all federal programs first assessed with the PART could not demonstrate results. That figure dropped by 20 percentage points between 2004 and 2005 after PART’s implementation. Now, 67 percent are rated effective, moderately effective or adequate. The Innovations Award is a program of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University ’s Kennedy School of Government, and is administered in partnership with the Council for Excellence in Government.

Update/Statistics on Government Contracting

Each year, federal agencies spend billions of dollars to buy commercial products and services through the General Service Administration’s (GSA) Multiple Award Schedules program, a program the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says has grown significantly over the past several years. Currently, federal agencies can directly purchase, through more than 16,000 schedule contracts, more than 8 million products from more than 10,000 commercial vendors. In fiscal year 2004, purchases from these contracts totaled more than $32 billion. The multiple award schedules program is designed to take advantage of the government’s significant buying power; to maximize savings, GSA negotiates discounts that are equal to or greater than those given to the vendor’s most favored customers. In August 2001, the GSA Inspector General reported that GSA was not consistently negotiating most favored customer pricing. For just one contract, the Inspector General projected that over the contract’s term, GSA customers would pay nearly $40 million more than they should have. In February 2005, GAO completed its most recent review of the multiple award schedules program and found that pricing problems persist.