By Calvin Biesecker
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continued to make “moderate progress” in its acquisition management practices during FY ’10, although progress was mixed among the various factors used in scoring progress, the Inspector General’s Office reported last week.
In the areas of workforce and policies and processes related to acquisition management, the IG said that DHS made moderate progress in FY ’10. The report points to a number of positive steps in improving the acquisition workforce, such as recruiting and maintaining staff to manage complex programs and getting authorization for more staff positions, but “it will, in all likelihood, take years before the department has a fully staffed and fully skilled acquisition workforce.”
The report is entitled Major Management Challenges Facing the Department of Homeland Security and focuses its scorecard this year on five management areas: acquisition; information technology (IT); emergency; grants; and financial. Moderate progress means that many critical success factors have been achieved.
For policies and processes within acquisition, the IG cites moderate progress in several areas such as providing acquisition alerts to heads of contracting throughout DHS and updating the Homeland Security Acquisition Manual to improve the level of guidance to the contracting chiefs.
Shortcomings remain here though, the report says, such as a continued lack of “methods for evaluating the effectiveness of an award fee as a tool for improving contractor performance and Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to accelerate its planned acquisition process improvements for awarding, managing, monitoring, tracking and closing-out contracts.”
In the two areas of organizational alignment and leadership, and knowledge management and information systems, the IG says DHS has made “modest progress” in acquisition management, meaning some improvements have been made but many critical success factors have not been achieved.
The report gives credit to the DHS Office of the Chief Procurement Officer for improving its oversight of contracting activities through reviews and published recommendations but left the modest progress rating “unchanged because the department continues to depend on a system of dual accountability and collaboration between the chief procurement officer and the component heads, which may sometimes create ambiguity about who is accountable for acquisition decisions.”
The IG cites DHS has saying that it is keeping the dual authority model because the DHS Chief Procurement Officer still has central authority over all contracting and because the various contracting officers with the agencies and components function independently of the components.
The IG also gives a moderate progress score to DHS in the areas of IT and emergency management. Within IT, the report says that moderate progress has been made in security during the past four years in compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act.
Only a mark of modest progress was given in the areas of financial and grants management. DHS continues to improve in financial management yet the IG’s independent auditor remains unable to provide opinions on the department’s consolidated balance sheet and statement of custodial activity because it can’t “provide sufficient evidence to support its financial statements or represent that financial statement balances were correct,” the IG said.
“Additionally, the independent auditor was unable to perform procedures necessary to express an opinion on DHS’ internal controls over financial reporting of the balance sheet and statement of custodial activity due to the pervasiveness of the department’s material weaknesses.”
In its report the IG also lists two other scoring options, limited progress, which means few if any plans have been implemented to address critical success factors, and substantial progress, in which most or all critical success factors have been achieved.