A Review of Alternative Methods to Inventory Contracted Services in the Department of Defense

"U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) spending on private-sector services has increased steadily over the past several decades to more than 60 percent of its overall budget. This growth has led to greater congressional interest in DoD's contracting practices, including the number of contracts for inherently governmental functions, contract management, contractor accountability, and contract waste, fraud, and abuse. Specifically, it has sought more oversight of the services purchased and the labor used to provide them, with the goal of increasing DoD's buying leverage and improving contractor performance. In 2008, legislation mandated the development of the DoD Inventory of Contracted Services (ICS), a database to collect information on the activities performed under DoD service contracts. Since that time, Congress has expressed concern about the methods DoD uses to collect this information and whether the ICS is useful to policymakers and DoD stakeholders. RAND was asked to conduct the congressionally mandated review of the system's data, gaps between the ICS data and congressional and other stakeholder needs, and whether the same or more useful information could be obtained from other sources. The study also included an assessment of legislative intent in mandating DoD to establish the ICS, a detailed evaluation of the current ICS metrics and data collection procedures, the development of alternative metrics drawing on different data sources, and illustrative analyses testing the validity of these alternative metrics and their corresponding data outputs."--Publisher's description.