Who Watches Contractor-Held Property at State Dept? No One!Back to our Afghanistan-contractors document for a minute. How could it be that the State Department could effectively lose $28 million worth of cars, guns, radios, computers, generators, and other not-easy-to-lose items? Probably because State doesn’t devote people to making sure the stuff is where the contractors say it is, in violation of federal regulations. From the State Department Inspector General:
[Federal Acquisition Regulation] assigns certain responsibilities, such as reviewing contractors’ property control systems and approving the type and frequency of physical inventories, to the [contracting officer] or “the representative assigned the responsibility as a property administrator.” However, the Department had not appointed a property administrator for these contracts, and Department officials indicated that it was not the Department’s practice to do so. …As of September 30, 2006, according to the Department, contractors held capitalized government property with a total cost of about $144 million and a net book value of almost $49 million. Although the Department has not appointed property administrators in the past, [the Office of the Inspector General] concluded that contractor-held property has reached such a level that the amount of oversight necessary cannot be met effectively by the Department’s existing property administration structure and recommends the following.
The federal government uses many acronyms. Unfortunately, WTF isn’t one of them.