Kenneth Fletcher
NS&D Monitor
6/12/2015
The National Nuclear Security Administration must better establish guidance for its contractor oversight using information from contractor assurance systems (CAS), according to a Government Accountability Office report released publicly this week. The NNSA asked its seven M&O contractors to implement the systems both to assure their own performance and to provide for enhanced NNSA oversight. However, the GAO found that the NNSA has not put standards in place to ensure oversight is consistent. “For example, at the headquarters level, NNSA has not provided guidance beyond its general framework for assessing the maturity of contractors’ CAS to determine whether information from CAS is sufficiently reliable for federal oversight purposes,” the report states. “In the absence of headquarters level policy, NNSA field offices—federal offices located at contractor operated sites and responsible for day-to-day oversight of M&O contractors—have established their own procedures for using information from CAS to conduct oversight, but these procedures also are not always complete and differ among field offices.”
The NNSA put the systems into place in a 2011 directive, envisioning that the agency could focus limited oversight resources on high-risk areas while the contractors could oversee their own performance in many places. The CAS was also to be used as part of NNSA’s annual contractor performance evaluations. However, without an established policy for oversight, “NNSA runs the risk of not using its oversight resources effectively, either by underutilizing information from CAS and missing opportunities for efficiency, or by overrelying on information from CAS and possibly missing contractor performance issues that put safety, security, or mission accomplishment at risk,” the report states.
2012 Incidents Raised Concerns About Effectiveness of Systems
Several recent events have called into question the effectiveness of the system, according to the GAO, such as the July 2012 break-in by peace activists at the Y-12 National Security Complex. Subsequent investigations found that “the Y-12 site’s M&O contractor properly recorded a growing backlog of maintenance needs to address security equipment failures in its CAS but did not act to address the security equipment failures,” the report notes. Also, in 2012 the NNSA’s fee determining official “acted to award contract term extensions to two M&O contractors with performance evaluation recommendations—made by oversight officials with direct access to information from CAS—that were not initially high enough to qualify these contractors for the extensions,” the report says.
The GAO included several recommendations for the NNSA that aim to improve effectiveness of its oversight. That includes establishing “comprehensive” guidance “for using information from CAS to conduct oversight of M&O contractors, clarifying whether CAS is to cover mission-related activities, and describing how to conduct assessments of risk, CAS maturity, and the level of the contractor’s past performance,” the report states. NNSA should also work with field office managers to establish procedures “consistent with headquarters policy and guidance to support assessment practices for determining appropriate oversight approaches,” it recommends.
NNSA to Issue New Corporate Policy
The NNSA agreed with the GAO’s recommendations in a May 19 response by Administrator Frank Klotz. The NNSA will cancel its current policy on CAS and “issue a corporate policy that will form a comprehensive framework for contractor assurance systems” by Sept. 30, according to Klotz. That will be followed by implementation guidance, to be completed by March 2016. Changes to field office procedures and guidance will be in place by September 2016, Klotz said.
Members of the House Oversight and Commerce Committee originally requested the report, and they called for action by the NNSA and Department of Energy following its release. “For nearly two decades this committee has uncovered management challenges facing the DOE complex involving contractor oversight. For the past five years, DOE has experimented with a new approach to contractor oversight that is not ready for prime time,” Reps. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Tim Murphy (R-Pa.), and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said in a statement. “We saw the results of this experiment at the Y-12 security breach in Tennessee three years ago and more recently in oversight failures that led to a costly incident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site. This report provides a roadmap on what NNSA must do to improve, and we will hold DOE and NNSA accountable for implementing the recommendations of the GAO report.”
