The General Services Administration (GSA) recently announced that beginning June 15, 2015, it will be using a new contractor assessment report to evaluate contractors with Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contracts. The new report, which is available here, will be issued to contractors after GSA industrial operations analysts (IOAs) conduct their contract assessments. The report will be limited to performance against contract terms and conditions and will be provided only to GSA and the individual contractor. The idea is to provide timely and tailored feedback to contractors and the acquisition community on issues pertinent to MAS contract compliance. GSA leadership spent two years developing the new report, which is intended to replace the Contractor Assistance Visit Report and the Administrative Report Card. GSA stated that assessments will be more frequent with contracts likely to have compliance issues, based on yearly sales. GSA hopes the Contractor Assessment Report will allow contractors and Contracting Officers to address problems before they become major issues.
A comparison of the new report and the old Administrative Report Card reveals two distinct differences. First, the new report appears to omit items that were included in the old report. Such omissions include whether the contractor has remitted the Industrial Funding Fee on time, whether the contractor is capable of accepting the Governmentwide Commercial Purchase Card, and whether a contractor is identifying items on GSA Advantage that have environmental attributes. If these items are to be covered under the new report, GSA should specifically identify under which categories those issues will be addressed.
Second, the new report, as a whole, is far less detailed. The lack of detail is unfortunate as it will provide less guidance to contractors. In addition, the lack of detail would appear to provide much broader discretion to the IOAs when conducting these assessments. While the old report card may not have been perfect, it at least contained enough direction to provide contractor’s with predictability as to what to expect during their MAS contract assessments.