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GCN Home > 09/25/06 issue

Passage of database bill is just the start

Political wrangling out of the way, OMB, agencies begin the heavy lifting

By Rob Thormeyer, GCN Staff

Getting the bill out of Congress was one thing, but setting up a massive database to track all sorts of federal spending will be something else entirely.

Federal and industry officials agree that creating the searchable Web site, as mandated under S 2590, is feasible, but doing so will take considerable effort because the spending data is inconsistent and scattered throughout multiple layers of government.

“Ideally, this is a good concept, but our concern is really the upfront work” of gathering and collecting the data, said Chris Jahn, president of the Contract Services Association, an industry trade group in Arlington, Va. “If you don’t get that right, it’s just garbage in, garbage out.”

Approval expected

The legislation—the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act—passed the House earlier this month and now awaits President Bush’s signature. The Office of Management and Budget supports the bill, and White House approval is expected.

Under the legislation, OMB must develop a searchable portal by January 2008 that details how agencies are spending taxpayer money. The site must include data on contracts, subcontracts, vendors, grants, subgrants, grant winners and task orders.

Most of the contracting data already is collected by the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation, an electronic reporting system maintained by the General Services Administration.

But information about grants has been harder to monitor. The FPDS-NG system interacts with nearly all agency procurement systems, including the Defense Department, which recently came on board.

But FPDS-NG has come under fire from all directions for providing inaccurate and incomplete data. In fact, the Acquisition Advisory Panel, a con- gressionally mandated public-private group that seeks to improve government procurement, recommended that OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy make considerable changes to help make the system more reliable.

These issues have some concerned that the new database may not be much better than the one already in place.

“If the government doesn’t fix the data creation and collection process first, the new database will have the same problems as the old one,” Jahn said.

David Lucas, director of government relations at Global Computer Enterprises of Reston, Va., the firm that developed FPDS-NG, said his company has enhanced the procurement database and fixed its major flaws by ensuring every agency uses the system.

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