By Calvin Biesecker
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made progress in its management practices related to the Secure Border Initiative (SBI) and oversight of the program’s prime contractor such as defining best practices and training staff, but the implementation of management controls has been mixed, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says in a new report on the program.
For example, Customs and Border Protection has defined policies for contract deliverables for the virtual fence portion of SBI, called SBInet, yet only followed its processes 62 percent of the time based on a sample of deliverables reviewed by the GAO, says the report, Secure Border Initiative: DHS Needs to Strengthen Management and Oversight of its Prime Contractor (GAO-11-6).
Boeing [BA] is the prime contractor for SBI.
“By not effectively verifying and accepting contractor deliverables, the SPO (System Program Office) cannot ensure that the deliverables will satisfy stated requirements, thus increasing the risk of costly and time consuming rework,” GAO says. As an example, the report cites test plans delivered by Boeing for the Network Operations Center/Security Operations Center (NOC/SOC) that were poorly defined, requiring changes to testing as it was ongoing.
“As a result of the testing problems, the SPO had to conduct multiple test events,” GAO says.
CBP has also defined its process for conducting technical reviews, such as Critical Design Reviews and others done throughout a program’s life to ensure that products and services meet requirements, GAO says. However, the agency has not implemented these reviews effectively, the report says.
Instead of doing technical reviews as defined, program officials conducted reviews based on requirements contained in specific task orders, which don’t have specific entry and exit criteria for when a review should be begin and end, GAO says.
“Without explicit entry and exit criteria, the basis for beginning and ending the technical reviews is unclear, thus increasing the risk that a program will be allowed to proceed and begin the next phase of development before it is ready to do so,” the report says. For example, it says, at the requirements review for the NOC/SOC, Boeing didn’t deliver a requirements traceability matrix as required under the task order until a month after the review was finished. So the review was concluded “without knowing whether the applicable higher-level system requirements were fully satisfied,” GAO says.
The SBInet program is currently in limbo. Boeing is working on delivering two sections of the surveillance and command and control system to parts of Arizona’s border with Mexico. Beyond that, however, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is reviewing whether to continue going forward with SBInet as originally planned or to deploy different solutions for different sections of the nation’s borders with Canada and Mexico. GAO says it doesn’t know when this review will be completed.