Sep 28, 2009

Lawmakers met Tuesday morning to probe the government’s disjointed tracking of contract information.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on contracting oversight hearing were to assess the effectiveness of “the decentralized and cumbersome systems” that track procurement spending, past performance and contractor responsibility.

The hearing also will discuss plans to integrate the systems to ensure better oversight, according to a news release from subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra was slated to testify. Also expected are William Woods, the Government Accountability Office’s director of acquisition and sourcing management; Adan Hughes, fiscal policy director for OMB Watch; and Trey Hodgkins, vice president of national security and procurement policy for TechAmerica.

The hearing was to be the first for the subcommittee’s new ranking member, Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah. In an interview with Federal Times, Bennett said the lack of interoperability between the systems drives up costs because databases cannot interface and share information, in some cases delaying when data becomes available to the public and managers who rely on it.

As ranking member, Bennett hopes to probe other areas of what he calls the “inertia” of government in order to fight waste, fraud and abuse in the procurement system. When he was in the private sector, Bennett said he often found savings in changing the way he did business, something government is slow to do, but needs to do.

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