ADP Procurement

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Finance Center's procurements from a computer manufacturer, focusing on whether: (1) USDA circumvented competitive procurement requirements in acquiring automatic data processing (ADP) equipment for the Center; and (2) the Center procured ADP equipment that exceeded its needs and entered into cross-servicing agreements with other federal agencies to use the excess capacity.

GAO found that: (1) in the 4.5 fiscal years ending in March 1990, USDA procured $51.3 million in ADP equipment for the Center; (2) USDA spent $26.2 million for 2 contracts with the computer manufacturer for mainframe computers and storage devices; (3) USDA spent an additional $900,000 for 59 orders of the computer company's equipment under General Services Administration (GSA) schedule contracts; (4) USDA complied with federal regulations in awarding the mainframe and storage device contracts, and the solicitation specifications for either procurement did not unnecessarily restrict competition; (5) the Center's failure to aggregate $163,000 in procurements of the contractor's equipment from the GSA schedule resulted in its avoiding a requirement that it advertise orders from the GSA schedule exceeding $50,000; (6) while the Center acquired excess computer capacity, there was no evidence that it deliberately bought excess equipment and then sought customers to use the extra capacity; (7) the Center lacked an adequate capacity planning process; and (8) Center officials believed that the use of the underutilized system would improve in fiscal year 1991.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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