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GAO studies contract competition

The GAO recently completed a five year study of competitive contracting.

Federal News Network Staff

August 26, 2010 7:56 pm

2 min read

wfedstaff | June 3, 2015 1:13 pm

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Competition is inevitable in government contracting. But the amount of that competition was somewhat of a mystery.

That is until the Government Accountability Office assessed the amount.

John Hutton, Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management Issues at the GAO, told Federal News Radio the reason why competition even matters in the first place.

“(Competition is) a cornerstone of our acquisition systems. It’s a tool for achieving, really the best possible return on investment for the taxpayer. As a vehicle it can help improve contractor performance, it might help curb some fraud, it can help promote accountability for results and some of our past work has demonstrated that agencies could take advantage of greater opportunities of competition.”

So just how exactly did the GAO go about assessing the amount of government competition?

“We first wanted to take a look at the landscape of what the current condition was for contracting within the federal government. We looked at the federal procurement data over a five year period and we went through that data, and looked the extent to which the fed government was obligating money on contracts that were non-comp awarded vs. using competition.”

Hutton noted the GAO studied the contract competition from fiscal year 2005 through fiscal year 2009. He notes that during the fiscal year 2005, “36 percent of the obligation were from non-competitive awards. In fiscal year 2009, it was about 31 percent.”

Hutton also pointed out the fact that while there was a five percent decline in that span, the total dollars obligated on federal contracts jumped from about $430 billion to about $540 billion.

While the percent of non-compete contracts decreased during the time studied by the GAO, those contracts were actually larger.

For more information on the report, click here.

For a summary of the report, click here.

Read the entire GAO report here.