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38 Procurement Law. 1 (2002-2003)

handle is hein.journals/procurlw38 and id is 1 raw text is: An Assessment of Today's Federal Procurement System By STEPHEN M. DANIES The 1990s were a great time in America and especially a great time for business in America. Or were they? With each passing week, there seem to be more revelations that cause us to question whether the truths that were general- ly perceived back then are as real as we once believed. Remember how stock prices would go up and up and up on an almost daily basis? And why not? After all, we were told that shares of dot-coms were worth vast multi- ples of earnings (or even of anticipated future earnings for those companies that were not making any money). All sorts of very big companies were making tremendous prof- its-or so they said. Private businesses were supposed to be engines driving an economic boom that would make all Americans rich and build bonds that would unify peo- ple throughout the entire world. Yes, business was great, and business practices were even better. Business practices were so good that if we wanted to make government work well, we needed to remake government processes in the image of business. We're a little older and wiser now. We know that the stocks of dot-com companies were enormously overvalued (if those stocks ever had any value at all). The prices of stocks of many other companies were inflated too, based on some pretty gross accounting tricks and other forms of dishonest behavior. Multinational companies may even- tually be a helpful force in bringing about a prosperous, cooperative world, but there seems to be more than a bit of divisiveness on our planet right now. Maybe-well, more than maybe-we have learned that some of those business practices at whose shrine many in government worshiped are not quite all they were cracked up to be. Some of those good business practices that we were told to follow were business procurement practices. We Stephen M. Daniels is chairman of the General Services Board of Con- tract Appeals. This article is a transcript of a speech given on August 15, 2002, as part of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy lecture series. were supposed to remake, or reinvent, or reform govern- ment procurement along different lines-what was said to be the business way of doing things. And we did. Gov- ernment procurement is conducted today in ways that are considerably different from the ways in which it was con- ducted only a decade ago. But are the current ways really better than the old ones? Or to ask the question in a bit more sophisticated manner, in making significant changes, have we aban- doned too much of the old? Are the ways in which the government acquires goods and services today genuinely superior, as their proponents told us they would be, or do they deviate so far from fundamental principles of gov- ernment procurement and incorporate so much of the Enron/WorldCom/whatever-company-is-in-the-news- this-week style of business practices that they are actually counterproductive? These are important questions for those of us in the government procurement world and for all American tax- payers. I don't mean to sound like the Cassandra of gov- ernment procurement, but I did raise similar questions during the past decade as the reinventions or reforms were taking hold. Only a few brave souls were willing to acknowledge that they were even listening back then. I'm (continued on page 10) 7Choir's Coluir 2 Letter from the Editor 3 News from the Regions 4 Apportionment of Legal Defense Costs 18 News from the Committees 21 Membership Questionnaire 23

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