Procurement

Department of State Should Be Competing Many Sole-Source Contracts Gao ID: NSIAD-89-6 January 24, 1989

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of State's sole-source contract awards to determine whether State: (1) should have sought competitive procurement; (2) complied with key federal regulations; and (3) properly reported its procurement data to the Federal Procurement Data Center (FPDC).

GAO found that State: (1) should have sought competitive procurement for eight of nine sole-source contracts awarded for periods ranging from several years to 30 years; (2) should have sought competition for six contracts for medical personnel services and one for automatic data processing support services; (3) reports to the Federal Procurement Data Center were incomplete, inaccurate, and unreliable; (4) did not maintain key internal controls to promote competition and limit unjustifiable sole-source contracts; (5) failed to develop a central computer database to collect and report its procurement data; (6) did not maintain a required payment file on each contract to ensure proper payments and provide supporting documentation for each contract; and (7) inaccurately documented 17 of 21 recently awarded contracts.

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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