Review of General Services Administration's Acquisition of ADP Resources

Gao ID: AFMD-81-21 December 17, 1980

GAO reviewed the plans of the General Services Administration (GSA) to acquire automatic data processing (ADP) resources and further extend the interim sole-source procurement of the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) INFONET contracts for teleprocessing services. It also reported on its findings on the long-range GSA plan to acquire ADP resources to support its internal data processing requirements and its concerns with GSA plans to remove certain ADP applications from CSC.

GAO has concluded that GSA has not conducted its acquisition of ADP resources in accordance with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-109 under which a competitive demonstration of alternative system design concepts submitted by vendors should be performed. Vendors are submitting proposals to support current applications without knowing what the redesigned system will look like. GSA will not meet its current milestones for acquiring its long-range ADP resources. Congress has been concerned about the continued reliance by GAO on sole-source, noncompetitive extensions of CSC contracts. GSA suspended CSC from future contracting and subcontracting with them as a result of an FBI investigation. It will not award a contract to the firm for any new business pending the completion of legal proceedings. It seems likely that the acquisition of ADP resources will not be completed to transfer the financial system from CSC by the date of contract expiration. In this developing emergency situation, GSA should consider other alternatives to support its financial system such as the use of other Federal facilities to process GSA financial system applications. GSA should take immediate action to transfer a scaled-down version to one of these facilities. Also, commercial time-sharing could be used as a method for GSA to terminate its dependent support with CSC.

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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