Defense Contracting

Sufficient, Reliable Information on DOD's Mentor-Protege Program Is Unavailable Gao ID: NSIAD-98-92 March 30, 1998

In 1990, Congress established the Pilot Mentor-Protege Program, which is intended to provide incentives for major defense contractors (mentors) to help disadvantaged small businesses (proteges) strengthen their capabilities and increase their participation as subcontractors and suppliers under Defense Department (DOD) contracts, other federal government contracts, and commercial contracts. This report reviews (1) DOD's management of the program, including its efforts to evaluate the program's effectiveness, and (2) the way in which program funds have been obligated. GAO also attempted to assess the extent to which the pilot program helped the proteges.

GAO noted that: (1) data limitations preclude GAO's assessing the extent to which the program is achieving the purpose established by Congress; (2) the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSADBU) has recently undertaken actions to review the program that were intended to provide the basis for such an assessment; (3) it has initiated a survey of mentors and proteges and enlisted the Defense Contract Management Command to conduct performance evaluations of each agreement; (4) however, GAO believes shortcomings in the survey methodology and incomplete coverage in the performance evaluations will limit the usefulness of their results in assessing the program's overall effectiveness; (5) Congress has appropriated about $233 million for the program since fiscal year 1992; (6) the funding was generally obligated through either cooperative agreements, separate contracts, or line items in DOD prime contracts; (7) while OSADBU has managed cooperative agreements in the past, it has decided that the services and the defense agencies should be responsible for managing reimbursable mentor-protege agreements; (8) the services have been inconsistent in their policies on paying fees to mentors for providing assistance to proteges and reimbursing proteges for various expenses; and (9) because sufficient and reliable information on program performance was unavailable, the overall extent to which the pilot program benefited the proteges could not be assessed.

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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