A fresh pair of eyes can bring risks to light

A fresh pair of eyes can see the otherwise unseen risks of management support services coming too close to inherently governmental functions, which others may have missed, the Government Accountability Office says.

Sometimes management support services drift slowly toward sensitive duties that workers don't realize what is happening. However, new employees who come into the program can see the developing problems because they haven't been living with the gradual evolution over a long period. 

“We found that concerns were generally raised by officials who were new to a program office or contracting officials who had assumed responsibilities for an existing contract,” GAO wrote in a report on the risks associated with support services. The report was released Jan.6.

For instance, a senior official in the Transportation Department’s Airline Information Office raised concerns about a lack of expertise among government employees to oversee IT duties. Contractors had developed and also exclusively operated the work for several years.

The contracting officer and contracting officer’s representative in the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Sudan Mission had concerns about interaction among federal employees and contractor staff in a newly established mission office. They feared that security and logistic challenges had left the government overly reliant on contractors’ expertise.

GAO had examples of other areas as well in the report.

GAO was reviewing the increased spending on professional and management support services since fiscal 2005. The services pose risks contractors knowing more about an agency’s operations than the agency’s own employees. Some services can easily bring contractors very close to supporting inherently governmental functions and the federal employees doing them.

Posted by Matthew Weigelt on Jan 10, 2012 at 1:25 PM