Recovery Board Chairman responds to concerns

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board is responding to concerns that its recent contract award lacked transparency.

Last week, the Recovery Board awarded a $9.5 million contract to Smartronix to redesign the Board's Web site, recovery.gov.

Earl Devaney is Chairman of the Board and tells FederalNewsRadio that the GSA's top procurement officer ran the contract, and Recovery Board members didn't know who the players were, nor how much the bids were for.

On Monday's Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris, Devaney went into further detail about what needs to be done.

"There's an entire infrastructure to be built. There's connectivity with other Web sites. There's the security piece, the backup piece and there's a whole host of things that are being done here and I would submit to you that these kinds of endeavors usually do cost this much. We're not simply putting out a visually more pleasing Web site."

Devaney adds that the original recovery.gov was launched quickly by GSA and OMB. He doesn't say they did a bad job, but notes that there is a lot more information and data that will need to be posted in the future, which is why a second version of the site is needed.

As far as the bidding process itself, Devaney says he and the other Board members aren't familiar with who bid how much. They only know that Smartronix won.

"This was a process that took place under some very strict guidelines and I'm assuming that a whole matrix of things was being looked at -- technology, cost and past performance -- [which] ultimately led to a winner."

Some have questioned the Web site's transparency, saying that the Board should have been aware of what was going on and that the bidding process should have been more open to begin with.

Devaney says the Board is trying to re-launch the site with the expertise of government contracting experts.

"We went to GSA -- I personally went to the head of GSA and asked for their best person -- and their chief procurement executive is the one that oversees this whole process. So, he selected . . . a team to come in from Texas to do this. So they put their best people on it and ran it in the best competitive way they know how to run one. I'm sure cost was one of the criteria, but certainly not the sole criteria, that led to the selection."

One of the biggest challenges, Devaney said, was time. A technical team took a few weeks, as opposed to months, to put together a statement of work. Then, the process of bidding for the contract was also fairly short.

"That is the overreaching risk that the Board is working under. The time frame is almost ridiculously short, but above necessity, we're going to make it happen."

Still others in the federal contracting community have asked the Board to release the contract in a redacted form -- another way of asking for more transparency.

Devaney says, it's not that simple.

"What we've got here is a new agency, the Recovery Board, and we have GSA, which of course does most of the contracting for the government. So what we have here is [that] we need to coordinate closely with GSA to ensure that what gets released is appropriate for release. Now, the contract itself is normally withheld during the bid protest period, and my understanding is that should be over next week -- and, at that point, I've asked them to consider releasing the contract immediately."

Quickness is still key. Devaney says that the Board has already met with Smartronix in the hopes of having the re-design take as little time as possible.

"It's fair to say that we hit the ground hour one. As soon as we knew who the winner was, we started reaching out and those meetings have been going on, both on the technical side and the actual Web design side. So, we've got meetings going on every day and Smartronix has put together a team and they're well underway."

As of now, once the re-design is complete, the Board will get to see it first. Devaney estimates that the site will then go live sometime at the end of August or in September.

This does not mean, however, that the public or industry will be kept in the dark about what's going on.

"I'm going to start a Chairman's corner on our Web site, maybe as early as this week sometime, and that's where you'll find announcements [such as] when the new 2.0 version will be live. . . . The entire board and I are committed to transparency. The reason I took the job was because, as an Inspector General, I had been railing against issues about transparency and accountability for years -- [the Board] was an opportunity to get involved in a grand experiment about transparency and accountability."

Devaney promises all data will be up and live on the site as soon as the Board receives it.

"Whether it's good, bad or indifferent, that data's going to go up -- and I'm assuming some people are going to be mad when it goes up. They're going to get embarrassed, but a group of IG's is going to do nothing less than put the facts up for everyone to see."

The problem with transparency, he says, is the fact that it's not always easy. He uses the immediate case of GSA. While he does not blame the agency, he does say two agencies working together are going to be slower at revealing things, simply because that's the way things work.

"We've got another agency to deal with that we have to talk to and encourage them to . . . Operate as quickly as possible and we'll get [the data] up. Instant transparency isn't necessarily our goal as much as making sure that the public gets to see everything that we do -- and we're doing that. It just may not be instantaneous."

Another example has to do with the contract. Devaney says, again, the hesitation to reveal does not mean that anything is being hidden.

"There may be things in that contract that the company considers proprietary business information. That has to be looked at. Attorneys have to look at that. Normally this thing would go through a FOIA process. We're encouraging GSA not to put it through their FOIA process, but to just take a scan and look at it to -- once the biding protest period ends -- to get that contract up on recovery.gov"

Devaney says, at the end of the day, the Board is trying to do its best to get information out to the public in a timely manner.

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On the Web:

Recovery.gov -- Web site

FederalNewsRadio -- OMB Watch: Concerns about recovery.gov contract

FederalNewsRadio -- Sunlight Foundation's bid on Recovery.gov

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