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GAO-13-714R 1 (2013-07-30)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaahej0001 and id is 1 raw text is: GAO U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Washington, DC 20548 July 30, 2013 The Honorable Mike Coffman Chairman Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Committee on Veterans' Affairs House of Representatives The Honorable Bill Johnson House of Representatives Department of Veterans Affairs: Available Data Not Sufficiently Reliable to Describe Use of Consulting Services You requested that GAO review the Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) use of consultants. This review focuses on how VA has used consulting services and what is known about the costs of these services. However, available data were not sufficiently reliable to identify the costs of consulting services used by VA. Therefore, this report outlines the data limitations related to consulting services for VA as well as some of the uses of consulting contracts. To identify how VA has used consulting services and their costs, we identified contracts in the federal government's procurement information system-referred to as the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation (FPDS-NG)-that VA awarded in fiscal years 2011 and 2012 and had been assigned North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes that contained the word consulting. According to the United States Census Bureau, NAICS is the standard used by federal statistical agencies in classifying business establishments for the purpose of collecting, analyzing, and publishing statistical data related to the U.S. business economy. From these contracts, we identified seven contracting offices within VA that were among the largest users of consulting services as measured by the dollar value of contracts awarded. These seven contracting offices included three within VA's Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction: (1) the Acquisition Business Service, Washington, D.C.; (2) the Strategic Acquisition Service, Frederick, Maryland; and (3) the Technology Acquisition Center, Eatontown, New Jersey. The remaining four contracting offices were within the Veterans Health Administration (VHA)-two within the Program Contracting Activity Central and two Veteran Integrated Service Network contracting offices.1 We interviewed contracting officials at each of the seven offices to obtain an overview of how the offices contracted for consulting services and for what purposes. We also discussed the officials' perspectives on what they considered to be a consulting service. 1For the purpose of selecting contracting offices to include in our review, we counted VHA's Program Contracting Activity Central as two contracting offices because in the FPDS-NG separate office contracting codes were assigned to offices responsible for energy and health technology contracting. The network contracting offices included in our review performed contracting for Veteran Integrated Service Network 5 (VA Capitol Health Care Network) and Veteran Integrated Service Network 22 (Desert Pacific Healthcare Network). GAO-1 3-714R Veterans Affairs Consulting

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