Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, criticized the federal government’s contractor performance databases as being “shockingly old and clunky” and lacking in key information, she said at a Senate subcommittee hearing on March 6.

      She cited BP Deepwater Horizon, which was responsible for a major oil spill, and CGI Federal, which built the “Obamacare” health insurance website, as examples of companies in which those lapses should have been noted in the federal vendor performance databases, but were not.

      “To ensure that these determinations are meaningful, the contracting officer needs to be able to access and review adequate information about the contractor’s performance and integrity. Unfortunately, the system we have today is not capable of doing that. Information about past performance and integrity is scanty, and what there is can be scattered across multiple databases. Reports can be difficult to find or just plain wrong,” McCaskill said during a hearing by the subcommittee on financial and contracting oversight.

      McCaskill described the “PPIRS” and “FAPIIS” contractor databases as being especially cumbersome to use. There also is contractor information in the “SAM” and “CPARS” databases.

      Kevin Youel Page, assistant commissioner of the General Services Administration, testified that the GSA has made great efforts to integrate numerous and disparate contractor databases since 2002.

      “Between 2002 and 2010, agencies used, and then sunset, nine separate input systems, each with its own contractor rating criteria. The different rating criteria made the comparison of past performance data challenging,” Page said.

      GSA also has been working to bolster the SAM.gov system, GCN reported in a related article (http://goo.gl/5cKxpt).

More information: Senate hearing http://goo.gl/tXql4b