On Monday, April 23rd, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced in a press release a new complaint to the Department of Labor on behalf of General Dynamics IT (GDIT) employees, alleging the company misclassified and, in turn, underpaid call center employees working under a call center contract for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CWA estimated the wages owed could exceed $100 million since the start of the contract in 2013. The contract for “Contact Center Operations”...

On the last business day in March this year, DOD ended the month with a huge spike in announcements of major foreign military sales (FMS). In total, the 13 contract awards and modifications totaled over $2.2 billion, for work from 8 contractors. The highest value contract awarded that day went to Boeing for “long-lead non-recurring engineering required to develop a baseline configuration for the production and delivery of 22 F/A-18E and 6 F/A-18F Super Hornets,” along with long-lead radar warning receivers...

A few months after we published our introduction to DOD’s new Other Transaction Authority (OTA), DOD announced a huge $950 million OTA award to REAN for streamlined cloud solutions, after the company’s success transitioning TRANSCOM systems to the cloud. The next month, after a GAO protest and public scrutiny, DOD announced to the press on March 5th that they would be scaling back the deal both in payment and scope: limiting the ceiling to $65 million, and narrowing performance to...

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) recently announced the award of an almost-$140 million contract for “commercial trucks and trailers,” to California-based Certified Stainless Service Inc. (doing business as West-Mark). While awarded through DLA, the agency expects the customer-base to span all of the U.S. Military branches and will even include other Federal agencies. West-Mark will build the equipment for use “within the Contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, the outlying areas and throughout Europe, Africa and the Pacific.” The globe-spanning equipment...

While DISA continues to work on awards for the Systems Engineering, Technology and Engineering (SETI) contract vehicle, the agency took an opportunity to ask interested parties to contribute ideas to a new “Innovative Contracting Playbook” which it is putting together. Inspired by the successful (and well publicized) NASA Space Poop Challenge, DISA is asking for input (in any format) on non-traditional contracting strategies it could utilize in the future. Mainly, it wants to know if contractors would participate in a...

Solely for “business planning purposes only,” the General Services Administration released a Request for Information (RFI) for Entity Validation Services, services currently fulfilled with the use of the Data Universal Number System (DUNS). While in an early stage, this could indicate the Federal government’s interest in moving away from the proprietary Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) identification system. The RFI specifically mentions the necessity for open access to the data by the public and the Federal government, which illustrates a key...

With a rule first proposed in 2016 by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and more DOD contracting regulations in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2018, contractors filing bid protests may soon have to pay processing fees to the agencies. While the GAO fees will apply as an administrative necessity to every protest, the proposed DOD protest fees will have a number of limiting factors that may have less of an impact on small businesses. EZGovOpps describes...

With Fiscal Year 2017 closed out, EZGovOpps decided to put together a small report which could illustrate the spending push that many Federal agencies enact in the fourth quarter, particularly in the final month of September. Using the EZGovOpps Awards software module, available in all EZGovOpps subscription plans, our analysts compared the number of contracts awarded during an early part of the fiscal year, in this case April, with the final contracts awarded in September for years 2015 through 2017. This...

UPDATE 3/16/2018: A DIUx-sponsored contract for cloud services took a major hit this week, with DOD shrinking the value from almost-$1 billion to only $65 million. Get the full scoop here.  After our primer on contract action types, EZGovOpps will provide a look at the “Other Transaction Authority” (OTA) that DOD holds. This authority allows for DOD to enter into transactions other than contracts, grants or cooperative agreements. Growing in use, these types of OTA transactions can reach up to...

After major acquisitions that have consolidated certain portions of the Federal market-share, including the Leidos acquisition of the Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS) subsidiary last year, and the announcement this year of UTC’s purchase of Rockwell Collins for $30 billion, creators of Federal procurement tools utilized by both agencies and contractors alike are now undergoing a similar phase of consolidation. On the market intelligence side, Onvia announced on October 5th that it agreed to be purchased by Project Diamond...