Department of Justice

Status of Implementing Private Attorney Debt Collection Pilot Program Gao ID: GGD-89-90 August 15, 1989

Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO evaluated the Department of Justice's pilot program for contracting with private attorneys for debt collection to determine: (1) Justice's compliance with federal competition requirements; (2) whether Justice obtained reasonable prices; (3) the extent to which Justice encouraged minority competition; and (4) program results.

GAO found that Justice: (1) generally followed federal competition requirements for identifying potential contractors in its first set of 5 pilot districts, with over 1,100 law firms expressing interest in obtaining contracts and 83 submitting proposals; (2) awarded 3 of its first 18 contracts to minority firms and was considering more awards to minority firms under its second set of 5 pilot districts; (3) generally followed federal contractor selection requirements, although it erroneously eliminated two potentially qualified firms from competition and provided only limited guidance for technical proposal evaluation; (4) did not adequately document its contracting process; (5) obtained reasonable prices for the legal services; (6) could not assess the cost-effectiveness of its contracting efforts, since it collected data on costs of private attorney debt collection efforts, but did not collect comparable cost information for participating U.S. attorney's offices; and (7) misreported cost information comparing private and U.S. attorneys' collection efforts.

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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