Job Opportunity: Government Contracting Officer…if you dare!

Swell in Contracting Officers May Not Keep Pace With Retirements

By Stephen Barr
Tuesday, May 6, 2008; D04

The number of contracting officers in the government increased to 28,434 in 2007, up 6.8 percent since the Bush administration began, officials said yesterday.

But how many contracting officers the government actually needs has not been determined, despite efforts by federal agencies, the Office of Personnel Management and the OMB over the past two years to develop plans for hiring and training contracting officers and specialists.

“We are still working real hard with OPM and the departments to try to figure out what the right number is,” said Paul A. Denett, an Office of Management and Budget official in charge of government procurement policy.

For his part, Denett added, “I believe we need to increase the hiring even more.”

Members of Congress have been concerned that the government has not done enough planning to get a handle on staffing and training needs of employees.

Spending on contracts has surged since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to more than $400 billion a year.

As the numbers have increased, some agencies have found it difficult to manage their contracts to avert fraud and abuse.

For example, a 2007 independent commission on Army contracting, headed by acquisition expert Jacques S. Gansler, found that the Army’s contracting operations in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones were not properly staffed, supported and trained.

Other studies have pointed out that statistics about the acquisition workforce have not been collected in a consistent fashion, creating some confusion about the status of the workforce. Experts have emphasized that personnel cuts, ordered by Congress in the 1990s, left many acquisition employees overworked or without necessary training.

In recent years, Congress and the Bush administration have tried to learn more about federal acquisition, with officials paying more attention to an annual demographic report on the acquisition workforce. The report is prepared by the Federal Acquisition Institute, which has published workforce data since 1977.

Yesterday, the OMB and the institute released the 2007 report, showing an increase of about 500 contracting officers in the government last year compared with the previous year. Most — 19,119 — worked for the Defense Department, with an additional 9,315 spread across the rest of the government.

According to the report, the number of contracting officers has been rising steadily since 2002, primarily in civilian agencies, where numbers increased from 7,995 in 2000 to the high of 9,315 last year.

But retirements are a concern, Denett said. The average age of contracting officers is 46, and about half of acquisition employees are eligible to retire within the next 10 years. Actual retirements are at a lower rate now, allowing agencies to stay on top of their turnover. Only 18 percent of contracting officers eligible for retirement are filing retirement claims, said Karen Pica, director of the institute.

The OMB is promoting an internship program to attract young people with business degrees into federal acquisition to help counter the loss of contracting officers and ensure that experienced hands pass along their knowledge to interns.

The government also is trying to track the careers of acquisition professionals and learn why some leave their jobs and move to related fields, such as general business and program management.

Preliminary data collected for the report showed that 444 contracting officers left their jobs in 2007 for other government posts. An additional 1,083 are no longer in the government because of retirement, death and other reasons, such as taking a job in the private sector.

And the Winners Are . . .

The National Capital Area Chapter of the American Society for Public Administration presents its annual awards Thursday to honor public service and efforts to improve government performance. This year’s winners are:

Kathryn E. Newcomer, associate director of the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University, will receive the Elmer B. Staats Award for Accountability in Government.

Timothy B. Clark, editor in chief of Government Executive magazine, will receive the David O. Cooke Award for Leadership in Public Service.

The Partnership for Public Service will receive the National Capital Area Chapter President’s Award for Outstanding Recent Contributions to Public Service. Max Stier, president of the partnership, will accept the award on behalf of the nonprofit organization.

Stephen Barr’s e-mail address isbarrs@washpost.com.

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About that Defense Accounting Department and Budget Overseers

For Defense, Crunching the Numbers Is Half the Battle

By Stephen Barr
Monday, May 12, 2008; D01

It has more than 3 million employees, more than 600,000 buildings and does business in 134 countries.

Those are some of the numbers that define the Defense Department, a megacorporation with lines of business and obligations that go far beyond war fighting.

“We do everything from floor waxing to repairing vehicles to accounting to logistics operations to running grocery stores,” said Tina W. Jonas, the department’s comptroller and chief financial officer.

From her Pentagon office, Jonas is responsible for the department’s financial management policies, the computer systems that track $3.4 trillion in assets and liabilities, an annual budget of more than $600 billion and efforts to modernize business practices.

There are big-ticket items, like health care, which costs $43 billion a year — “about $3 billion more than Germany spends on its entire defense budget,” Jonas said — and is likely to keep on increasing, to a projected $64 billion in 2015.

And there’s the daily grind of managing cash flow. For example, every time the price of fuel goes up by $1, it costs the department $130 million, she said.

“When you get to this level, pretty much everything that walks through your door is going to be a problem,” Jonas said during a recent interview. “So what you have to have is a mind-set to be a problem solver and figure out a corrective action plan.”

Jonas was sworn in as an undersecretary of defense in July 2004, after serving as an assistant director and chief financial officer for the FBI. She also has worked as a budget examiner at the Office of Management and Budget and as a staff member on the House Appropriations Committee.

Her job is one of the toughest in the government. The Pentagon has been widely criticized for years on Capitol Hill and by think tanks for poor management, cost overruns, improper payments and payroll problems. The Government Accountability Office designated the department’s financial management as an area of “high risk” in 1995.

Jonas, however, thinks the department is making substantial progress in financial management. She has created a “dashboard” on her desk — two flat-screen monitors that display trend data on dozens of accounts over multiyear periods.

“We look at our numbers and say, ‘We’re not doing too hot today,’ or, ‘What are we doing about this problem that is emerging?’ or, ‘The trend doesn’t look good here,’ ” she said.

One dashboard chart shows Jonas the percentage of debt more than 60 days old because of unpaid bills from “purchase cards,” a government credit card used by federal employees for official business. The delinquency rate is about 4 percent, down from nearly 7 percent in 2001.

Another chart shows that unsupported accounting entries have been reduced from $2.3 trillion in 1999 to $95.7 billion at the end of last year. The goal is to make sure all financial information is documented, putting to rest allegations that the department can’t find or track its money, Jonas said.

According to the dashboard, the Army’s account for military salaries and other expenses will run out of money by June 15. Jonas will likely have to transfer funds from other accounts if a supplemental spending act does not take effect in time.

“It drives me a bit crazy when people say the department’s books are all messed up and we don’t know what the heck is going on,” Jonas said. “We do know what is going on.”

Part of the department’s accounting woes can be attributed to outdated technology. Some computers in the field still run on old COBOL program language, operating like a checkbook register showing money in and money out, but incapable of connecting to a department-wide system that generates financial statements.

By June, Jonas hopes to have deployed new accounting codes and a software language that pulls together the department’s 2,900 accounting systems.

Next year, Jonas predicts that two-thirds of the department’s assets and liabilities will be ready for independent audits, a major step on the road to producing a department-wide financial statement that adheres to generally accepted accounting principles.

Jonas also has moved to cut operating overhead. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which once had 22,000 employees, is down to 13,000 and will shrink to 7,000. With the reductions and improvements in technology, the department has saved $500 million in operating costs.

Such savings “in the back office,” Jonas said, make millions of dollars available for the armed forces. “It matters to the soldiers, it matters to the Marines, it matters to the airmen, it matters to the sailors, and all their families and all our defense workers whether or not we are efficient.

“So at least we are trying to change the culture, and we think we’ve made some good progress.”

Stephen Barr’s e-mail address is barrs@washpost.com.