The Small Business Administration has issued two new sets of rules: one governing set-asides of federal contracts for woman-owned small businesses and the other changing the requirements regarding which firms may certify their status as small disadvantaged businesses.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has just decided a case that clarifies the limits of an agency's efforts to avoid competition by subcontracting the acquisition to an integrator under a prime contract.
The six-year procurement experiment that exempted TSA from Federal Acquisition Regulation rules has finally come to an end. After June 23, all of its procurements became subject to the FAR rather than to the Acquisition Management System rules used by the FAA.
Companies needlessly expose themselves to risk when they succumb to the temptation to substitute less-qualified people who lack the experience required for the labor category to which they were assigned.
During the last week of February, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ordered the Defense Department not to exercise any future options that extend a support services contractwith Lockheed Martin Corp. for DOD's Tricare medical services program. The order follows a decision last year that the contract award violated organizational conflict of interest rules.
A new subpart to the Federal Acquisition Regulation took effect that requires contractors to establish a code of business ethics and conduct and to take steps to promote ethics and early discovery of improper conduct.
Performing software development, data entry and customer services work with offshoresubsidiaries is a common practice. But when a government contractor wants to launch an overseas operation, the practice raises questions.
Government subcontractors aren't necessarily at the mercy of their prime contractors in obtaining payment for goods and services delivered by the subcontractor to government customers.
In commercial contract law, if a clause is intended to survive the termination of the balance of a contract, the contract will say so, which illustrates another disparity between commercial and government contract law.
Government contractors are familiar with the federal False Claims Act. Many contractors are probably unaware, however, that some states also have their own false-claims acts, a number that is growing.
Several useful lessons were highlighted last month when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decided a case that brought to a close a long-running dispute between an SBIR grantee and the government.
The Homeland Security Department has released its new application for manufacturers and service providers seeking protection from legal liability under the Safety Act.
IT services companies need to be especially careful about employment discrimination issues, which, if mishandled, inevitably divert management and employee attention from project work and lead to lower productivity and delay.
More than two years after issuing its interim rules implementing liability protections for contractors under the Safety Act, the Homeland Security Department June 8 issued its final rule.
If you think that large sole-source contracts are awarded only to a handful of well-connected big companies with the resources to manage dozens of subcontractors in difficult surroundings, you are not privy to one of Washington's open secrets: Such contracts are available to almost anyone to provide almost any service procured by an agency.
Organizational conflict of interest is a charge often bandied about but infrequently pinned down. Teaming partners frequently are asked to avow that they'll have no OCI if a contract is awarded, and subcontractors must warrant that their previous work for an agency won't create an OCI.
Contractors that use online employment applications or resume databases will need to submit the data in their annual EEO-1 reports and during compliance audits.
