An Energy Department effort to disallow $15.4 million in fees to Leidos-led Mission Support Alliance can go forward, the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals ruled recently.
The services vendor at the Hanford Site in Washington state asked Civilian Board of Contract Appeals (CBCA) for summary judgement against the agency’s attempt to disallow $15.4 million in costs or reimbursement payments incurred by MSA subcontractors. But in a July 22 ruling, the board refused MSA’s request because “genuine questions of material fact” remain.
Mission Support Alliance provides a wide range of landlord services — including security, road maintenance, telecommunications, and information technology support — under a roughly $5 billion contract that started in May 2009 and is set to expire in November.
Back when the MSA contract began, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) was in charge of vetting subcontractor-incurred costs for DOE prime contracts such as Mission Support Alliance. But passage of the fiscal 2016 National Defense Authorization Act stipulated that DCAA would no longer do audits for contracts outside the Department of Defense umbrella.
In March 2016, MSA submitted its plan for auditing its subcontractor costs to the Energy Department. The prime contractor contends that DOE “approved” its subcontractor audit plan months later, but the agency says that misstates the government’s position at the time. In December 2018, MSA updated DOE about its efforts to do the required audits. The DOE contracting officer on the MSA contract subsequently disallowed the $15.4 million in subcontractor-incurred costs.
Mission Support Alliance appealed the ruling to CBCA, saying the Energy Department changed the rules by saying the prime contractor must audit all subcontractors, rather than just a representative sample of them.
On Monday, another Leidos-led joint venture, Hanford Mission Integration Solutions (HMIS), is scheduled to begin its transition to take over MSA’s work as the site support prime for the former plutonium-production complex.
