CFPB Contract Solicitation and Selection Processes Facilitate FAR Compliance, but Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Internal Controls

Appendix B Management's Comments

 

Recommendation 1: Develop an internal policy describing how the CFPB implements the Federal Acquisition Regulation requirements pertaining to the agency's competition advocate. 

We concur with this recommendation, while noting that progress has been made since the audit was conducted. The Office of Procurement takes competition very seriously as its promotion and practice allow the Bureau to receive the benefits of commercial market pricing and/or discounts for goods and services by allowing the vendor community to compete for CFPB business. Furthermore, it improves quality of service, enhances solutions, and promotes fairness and openness that leads to public trust. As the report notes, our office collects and evaluates competition data on a monthly and fiscal year basis through internal and external reporting methods. In fiscal year 2011, 86% of contract dollars were competed and for fiscal year 2012, 93% of contract dollars were competed. We have made progress toward completing a competition policy that will address the role of the competition advocate and the duties required in accordance with the FAR. Moving forward, competition reporting and activities will be explicit and aligned with the role of the competition advocate as defined by the FAR. Consistent with best practice as noted in your report, my Deputy Assistant Director for Procurement shall continue in the advocate role with support from my analyst team and staff assistance in order to carry out required duties.

Recommendation 2: Finalize, disseminate, and implement the Small Business Review Form to facilitate FAR compliance related to small business participation. 

We concur with this recommendation, while noting that progress has been made since the audit was conducted. The Office of Procurement has approved and released a small business policy with a supplemental small business review form. The policy standardizes the usage of the review form to ensure coordination with the small business specialist and consideration of small businesses during acquisition planning. Since the inception of our office, we have considered small business participation in CFPB procurements as a planning priority. This is significant because during the review period for this report, the Bureau had not yet established its Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI) and did not have another inter-Bureau office advocating for small business participation. As a result, the Office of Procurement established a goal for small business participation to include specific socio-economic categories as defined by the FAR. 36% of contract dollars were awarded to small businesses in fiscal year 2011 and 27% were awarded in fiscal year 2012. We exceeded our goals for women and small disadvantaged (minority owned) businesses in both years.

Recommendation 3: Enhance CFPB Procedures to require documentation from the program official justifying urgent procurement requests. 

We concur with this recommendation. As you note, the review period of your report was during our early implementation stages, which necessitated the need for expedited procurement processes in order to support the emergent and growing needs of the Bureau. We are pleased that you found these expedited awards compliant with the FAR. For the particular contract mentioned, the acquisition plan was not required at the time due to the dollar value, but was completed nonetheless to further outline planning decisions for the file. Also, while some competed actions were expedited through various means, there were no instances of limiting competition to a restricted number of sources per FAR section 6.3. Further, we have made progress in limiting expedited timelines since the audit was conducted. As the Bureau matures and our staffing plan is fully realized, our focus has been applied to enterprise-wide procurement planning across the Bureau. Coordination efforts have been conducted with other Bureau offices in order to ascertain procurement needs well in advance, which are tracked in a pre-award pipeline. This pipeline is now a part of our planning infrastructure and identifies all procurement actions in progress along with planned milestone dates from solicitation release to award. Although we have taken great care in ensuring our procurement processes (to include expedited awards) are in conformance with the FAR, our pipeline infrastructure puts us in even a better position to plan and solicit for procurement actions without the use of expedited timelines. Nonetheless, we will also institute an "Expedited Need" request form, which will be reviewed for approval by the Office of Procurement. The form will require justification of expedited processing times when such a case exists.