A new rule authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders will make a federal contractor fraud database accessible to the public for the first time.  The database lists incidences of misconduct by contractors.  “The American people have every reason to expect that their tax dollars are well-spent,” Sanders said.  “For this reason, I am pleased that with this new legislation every contractor’s history of illegal behavior will be posted on a publicly-accessible online database.  I strongly expect that this new public awareness will put an end to handing out taxpayer-financed contracts to corporations with a history of fraud.” According to a front page article in Monday’s Boston Globe, defense companies and other major industries are trying to block the new public disclosure law.  More than a dozen groups, in a letter to congressional committees, hailed the provision “as a major advance in contractor accountability and transparency,” according to the Globe. 

The newspaper also reported:

In March, before the measure was passed, Obama supported the concept. “We’ll be able to see, before any new contract is awarded, whether a company plays by the rules, how well they’ve performed in the past,’’ Obama said at the time. “Did they finish the job on time? Did the company provide good value? Did the company blow their budget?’’ Within days of Obama signing the war funding bill, industry groups began urging the administration to exclude some information they contend could be damaging.

The Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System is a database created by the Clean Contracting Act of 2008 and is an important tool for tracking the behavior of federal contractors. The Sanders amendment, which was included in a recently-enacted military spending bill, requires that the database be posted on the Internet, ensuring that the public has access to this critical, public information about where their tax dollars are going.  It lists prior findings of liability relating to federal contracts, including findings from criminal, civil, and administrative proceedings.  The database also lists whether the contractor has ever defaulted on a prior federal contract.  Finally, it lists whether contractors have engaged in such egregious behavior to have been suspended or disbarred from contracting.
 
To read the Globe article on contractors’ efforts to avoid full disclosure, click here.

For more information about the Sanders amendment, click here.