FAA Procurement

Competition for Major Data-Processing Project Was Unjustifiably Limited Gao ID: IMTEC-90-71 June 11, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) acquisition approach for its Computer Resources Nucleus (CORN) project, focusing on whether a key design requirement may have unnecessarily limited competition.

GAO found that: (1) the agency's original objective for the CORN procurement was to achieve full and open competition and innovative vendor proposals; (2) FAA decided to require a single architecture solution that would reduce operational costs and provide a technical data-base platform; (3) a single architecture would not meet these objectives; (4) the CORN solicitation did not define key functional requirements for achieving its objectives, such as those pertaining to data accessibility; (5) FAA unjustifiably limited competition and restricted the range of solutions that vendors could offer; and (6) FAA dictated a system design that might not satisfy its needs.

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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