The U.S. Department of Energy could do a better job of monitoring how its contractors spend billions of dollars in federal money, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.
The new GAO report recommends DOE entities, including the Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, put more emphasis on how management and operations contractors control costs.
The Energy Department spent roughly $193 billion on management and operations contracts over a 10-year period, covering fiscal years 2006 to 2016, and in annual performance reviews typically issued the contractor high marks and over 90 percent of available performance incentive fees.
The cost information available in performance reviews lacked detail, applied only to certain activities, and generally was of limited value in deciding whether to extend a contract, the GAO said.
The government management watchdog reviewed performance evaluation reports issued to operations contractors at a half-dozen DOE branches: the NNSA; and the Offices of Environmental Management, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Fossil Energy, Nuclear Energy, and Science. The GAO studied performance evaluation paperwork for 21 contracts.
That covered two Environmental Management contracts for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and one for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. At the NNSA, GAO studied reviews done on nine contracts: Savannah River, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Nevada National Security Site, NNSA Production Office locations, Pantex Plant in Texas, Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, and the Kansas City, Mo., National Security Campus.
Two of the three instances in which contractors received less than 50 percent of the incentive fee were connected to a nearly three-year waste disposal outage at WIPP. There were two unrelated accidents, a truck fire and a radiation release at the underground disposal site in February 2014. Both the contractor for WIPP, and the then-management contractor for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which packaged the radioactive waste drum burst, received low ratings.
The report was filed for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
