<<Back to Article National Association of Government Contractors www.governmentcontractors.org Government agencies work to certify accuracy of contracting data Feb 6, 2008 The federal government’s central repository of contracting data has long been criticized for being incomplete and inaccurate. Last year, the Office of Management and Budget launched an effort to clean up what gets fed into the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) by directing agencies to test sample data for accuracy. All but one have done that and certified that their data entries are mostly accurate, said Robert Burton, OMB’s deputy procurement policy administrator. The Defense Department is still working on validating its data. Depending on the agency, data is accurately entered into FPDS between 85 percent and 100 percent of the time, said Christopher Fornecker, a General Services Administration official who oversees FPDS.  Automated reporting has made it easier for agencies to load data into the system and reduced the errors associated with manual entry under the old system. But the volume of contracts has grown, making the issue of validating data more important and even more challenging. While the quality of the data in the database is improving, there are still problems, say some critics who use FPDS regularly. Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president and chief knowledge officer of FedSources Inc., a market research firm, frequently runs FPDS reports and said the data in FPDS is more frequently updated than in the past, making it more accurate and complete. But even with automated reporting and validation steps, people entering data still make mistakes the current software can’t catch, he said. Bjorklund said he’d rate the accuracy of the data as a seven out of 10. “That is not a very strong grade,” he said. The new certification requirement has raised the importance of data accuracy to the highest levels of management, Burton said. Agencies are much more focused on getting data right than they have been in the past, he said. With more than $400 billion spent through procurements each year, the data is critical to managing functions and determining the type of staffing needed, said Paul Denett, OMB procurement policy chief, in a March memo to agencies. FPDS “must be an authoritative source that allows agency managers, contractors and policy-makers to make informed business decisions,” he said. The launch of the federal spending Web site, USASpending.gov, in December has given new insight into the accuracy concerns with FPDS. As of Jan. 31, 6 percent, or $23 billion, of the 2007 contract dollars reported in the system had an unknown level of competition, which means a box in FPDS didn’t get checked. The inaccuracies found in FPDS come from the push to be current, which meant GSA had to relax some of the verification rules. The government had the option of waiting months for perfect data or entering data as contracts were awarded to provide transparency, Fornecker said. “We’re still recovering from that decision” to input data quickly, he said. GSA is seeking smarter validation technologies when it upgrades to the next generation of FPDS in 2010. Instead of simply telling users which fields in their system are missing, GSA hopes to create a system where fields can be compared to make sure the data makes sense, Fornecker said. For example, the system would be able to flag a $6 billion award to a small business or question conflicting information, such as when a contract award is labeled as “not competed” even though two or more bids were received. Meanwhile, the Defense Department won’t have an assessment of the accuracy of its data until spring, said Shay Assad, the department’s procurement policy chief. Software bugs and missing data fields in FPDS were causing some inaccuracies, and those are being fixed, Assad said. The biggest cause for inaccurate data is human error, Burton said, but system errors also play a role. For example, the Energy Department reported that between 8 percent and 17 percent of its errors came from how FPDS interpreted the data sent by its contract writing system. The remaining errors were human errors, according to the Energy report. Article URL: http://www.governmentcontractors.org/articles/a.513.asp © Copyright 2005-2008 The National Association of Government Contractors