Accountability in Contracting Act

Floor Speech

ACCOUNTABILITY IN CONTRACTING ACT

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Mr. LYNCH. Madam Chair, I want to, first of all, thank the gentleman for yielding.

I rise in strong support of H.R. 1362, the Accountability in Contracting Act. This is contract reform legislation that was reported favorably out of our Oversight Committee by unanimous consent, and I think that speaks to the merits of this bill. As a result of the hard work of Chairman Waxman and Ranking Member Davis, this is a good first step in bringing accountability to contracting practices in our government.

By minimizing the use, as others have said, of the abusive no-bid contract practice, we will reintroduce competition into this contracting protocol used by our government. As well as limiting the use of cost-plus contracts, we will strengthen the reporting and disclosure requirements for contract overcharges and increase funding for contract oversight personnel. H.R. 1362 will address the glaring weaknesses in our Federal procurement system that have caused considerable waste, fraud, and abuse of American taxpayer dollars.

The need to reform Federal contracting law has been with us for some time and demonstrated, I think, glaringly during our series of contracting hearings in the House Oversight Committee, as we continue to examine a variety of misguided and poorly managed, poorly designed, and extremely costly Federal contracts that have been issued.

In the area of Iraq reconstruction, where we have spent a lot of time, we have learned from William Reed, the Director of the DCAA, the Defense Contract Audit Agency, of more than $10 billion, 10 billion with a ``b,'' in questioned and unsupported costs related to our Iraq reconstruction and troop support contracts. In addition, based on updated data provided to the committee by DCAA, we know that Halliburton's three massive cost-plus contracts alone are the source of at least $2.7 billion in questioned and unsupported billings. And until recently, unfortunately, we have not had auditors on the ground in Iraq. The DCAA did not have contractors on the ground to review these contracts. They were auditing these contracts from Alexandria, Virginia. We have changed that process and put people on the ground.

In the area of homeland security, we recently examined the Department of Homeland Security's $24 billion contract to modernize the Coast Guard's aging fleet and the $30 billion SBInet contract to design and implement a modernized border security plan. Based on thousands of pages of documents provided by DHS to our committee, we have learned that the Department's oversight of these massive contracts is severely limited by what they call the ``prime integrator'' contracts. These prime integrator contracts vest the government oversight responsibility in program design and construction to contractors to do this very work. In addition, we came to find out the Department had actually contracted out oversight functions that it had retained under the contract terms.

This is a good first step. And I want to give great credit to Chairman Waxman for his good work and also Mr. Davis for building compromise in this, and I think that the American taxpayers will be better served by the result of the work of these two gentlemen.

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