Federal Prison Industries

Federal Prison Industries (FPI) is a wholly owned government corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons. FPI, which was created by Congress in 1934, markets about 150 types of products and services to federal agencies, from electronic components to furniture refinishing. In fiscal years 1996 and 1997, FPI had net sales of about $496 million and $513 million, respectively, in products and services. This report provides information on whether FPI delivers its products and services in a timely manner. GAO (1) assesses statistics on FPI delivery performance and (2) provides the views of selected customer agencies' procurement officials on FPI's delivery practices.

GAO noted that: (1) FPI delivery performance is improving; (2) 8 of the 12 months in fiscal year (FY) 1997 had better on-time delivery performance than the same months in FY 1996; (3) however, FPI fell short of meeting its on-time delivery goal of 90 percent in FY 1997; (4) there was a wide variation in FPI performance by customer agency and some variation by product category; (5) the results of GAO's analysis and FPI's own timeliness evaluations should be viewed with two caveats in mind; (6) they both likely overstate timeliness because they did not account for shipping time for orders with due dates specified as the day the order should arrive at its destination; (7) GAO and FPI's timeliness evaluations considered all shipments to be on-time if FPI data showed that they left the factory on or before the due date; (8) accounting for shipping time for orders with destination due dates would have improved the accuracy of the timeliness evaluations and provided a better picture of performance; (9) its review of 109 randomly selected orders showed that over one-half of them had due dates in FPI's system that were later than what customers had originally requested; (10) because of limited documentation, GAO could not always determine the reasons due dates were different, including whether FPI had not accepted them, or whether customers were notified of the reasons for changes and approved of the revised due dates; (11) although the results of these 109 orders were not projectable to the universe of FPI orders, they raised questions about which due dates should be used to measure timeliness, especially from the customer's perspective; (12) just as GAO's analysis by customer agency showed wide variation in FPI delivery performance, customer agency officials within the Defense Logistics Agency, the Federal Supply Service, Social Security Administration, and Department of Veterans Affairs had mixed views on FPI's delivery performance, despite FPI's goal to promote total customer satisfaction; (13) although GAO sought the views of only selected customers, several key procurement officials within these agencies were clearly dissatisfied with FPI's delivery performance and practices; (14) FPI does not develop delivery performance data by customer agency; and (15) without these data, FPI was not in a good position to easily detect individual agencies' problems with its performance and to improve overall customer relations.

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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