Two years after an Inspector General report found that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had a weak record on suspending and debarring non-performing contractors, the department has bolstered its program by establishing a Suspension and Debarment Official (SDO) that is currently creating best practices for the entire department, the top DHS procurement official said yesterday.

“We get this,” Nick Nayak, the chief procurement officer at DHS, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Procurement Reform. “We’re going to get it right. We’re going to be a best practice agency.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano last November established a centralized Suspension and Debarment Program, which led to the creation of the SDO, Nayak said. And, earlier this year, Under Secretary for Management Rafael Boras made the SDO a direct report within his office, he said.

“DHS is committed to good stewardship of the taxpayers’ dollars using suspension and debarment as appropriate tools to protect the government and taxpayers from contractors that engage in fraudulent, criminal or other seriously improper conduct,” Nayak said in his prepared remarks.

Suspension and debarment respectively refer to temporarily suspending a vendor from doing business with the federal government for a period of time, typically a year, or for a longer period of time in the case of a debarment, three years.

Suspension and debarment programs across the federal government are a mixed bag, but agencies that are most active in this area share common characteristics, Bill Woods, director for Acquisition and Sourcing Management at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), told the panel. These characteristics amount to best practices that all agencies should institute to strengthen their suspension and debarment activities, he said.

These common characteristics include having full-time staff–even if just a handful of people–dedicated to suspension and debarment activities, detailed policies and procedures for conducting these activities that go beyond what is called for in Federal Acquisition Regulations, and practices that “encourage an active referral process” that brings matters to the attention of appropriate officials, Woods said.

Woods’ testimony was based on a GAO report released yesterday that examined suspension and debarment activities at 10 federal agencies. The report says that between 2006 and 2010 there were 29,000 cases of federal contractor exclusions reported through the General Services Administration (GSA), of which about 4,600 were suspension and debarment actions taken by agencies against contractors and individuals.

The report says that the agencies it reviewed that have the best practices and policies are the Defense Logistics Agency, the Navy, GSA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agencies reviewed by GAO that lacked these common characteristics were the Departments of Commerce, Health and Human Services, Justice, State and Treasury, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.