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Photo by Susanne M. Smith

Summer 2008

Interior Department IG Confirms Contracting Abuses by The National Park Service

Washington, D.C. --  In February 2008, the Department of Interior Inspector General issued a report that confirmed that the National Park Service’s actions in contracting for the Washington Monument grounds work in 2001 constituted an illegal sole source award. 

The report is entitled “Sole Source Contracting:  Culture of Expediency Curtails Competition in Department of the Interior Contracting (Report No. W-EV-MOA-0001-2007).

The report came 4 years after the IG was asked by the National Coalition to Save Our Mall to investigate the National Park Service’s (NPS’s) de facto sole source award of a contract to reconfigure the grounds around the Monument and create a new underground visitor center and tunnel entrance into the Monument for the alleged purpose of enhancing the physical security of the site.

For more background on the story, go here.  In the course of challenging in court the NPS’s plans, the Coalition uncovered the contracting irregularities.  The Coalition’s attorney was convinced that the actions of the NPS in making this de facto sole source award violated not only the Federal Acquisition Regulation, but also the Competition in Contracting Act.

The IG’s findings are truly extraordinary.  In the first paragraph under “Results,” he says:

Contracting actions at the Department reveal a culture that values expediency over protection of the best interests of the public.  This culture is exacerbated by the lack of best practices….

Given the Department’s heavy reliance on sole source procurements with inadequate or non-existent justifications and its failures to establish fair value for these procurements, the Department has no assurance that the public gets the best value for the goods and services it buys.

We found that modifications of competed contracts sometimes resulted in de-facto sole source contracts and that justifications for other than full and open competition were non-existent or unconvincing.

With respect to the Washington Monument “security upgrade” project, the IG found that the contracting officer responsible for the project authorized an increase in contract value from $5 Million to $44.5 Million, and procured work that was significantly different in scope (security upgrades to the grounds) than the work covered by the original $5 Million contract (stabilize and preserve the monument itself). 

Coalition attorney Joseph West said that anyone with expertise in federal contracting will confirm, this action – executing a change to a contract that is almost 9 times the value of the contract itself, and that covers a radically different scope – was blatantly illegal and quite likely cost the federal government millions more for the “security upgrade” work than if the work would have been competitively procured. 

The IG noted that these de facto (and other actual) illegal sole source awards occurred because:

[T]he contracting officers opted to take the fast and easy way, which was to modify an existing contract, rather than the conscientious and correct method, which was to issue a separate contract and promote competition.

The IG has made 3 recommendations in the Report, the third of which is that Department management “must be held accountable” for the flagrant violations of federal procurement laws and regulations. 

The National Coalition to Save Our Mall is not aware of any action that has been taken by the Department of Interior, National Park Service, or Congressional oversight committees to address this “Culture of Expediency.”

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