Government Services Contracts

The extensive use of contractor personnel to augment military intelligence operations is now an established fact of life and, occasional contracting “scandals” notwithstanding, any effective and efficient design for intelligence support to operating forces must provide for their use. The civilian sector can respond to rapidly changing requirements of the Global War on Terror with flexibility and speed that the government sector does not possess. And, in a number of cases, the civilian sector possesses technology, equipment, and technological know-how that the government sector could not acquire in any reasonable amount of time. Add to this the problem of end-strength limitations and recruiting and retention problems, and it is apparent that contractors are a permanent part of the intelligence landscape.
But this dependence on contractors comes with its own set of problems, most of which stem from inadequate planning and from lack of training of deployed uniformed personnel in the intricacies of contracting for and administering contractor personnel. The author points out certain steps that must be taken to provide for effective management of contractor personnel in the field, and, indeed, the Army even has a Field Manual devoted to contractor administration which brings out many of the same points. Yet uniformed intelligence personnel continue to be deployed without adequate training and preparation to handle contractors who will be supporting them.

One critical element of PFI projects is the contract which binds the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) (project promoter) with the government (client). Drawing up the PFI contract is by no means a simple undertaking because elements of economy, social, technological and intellectual considerations will have to be coherently spelt out. Adding on to this now is the requirement to include sustainable considerations. However, this can be very vexing because sustainable project elements can have serious implications to the project implementation process, costing and viability.
To assist circumvent of this challenge; a research was mooted to explore the best possible alternatives for incorporating sustainable considerations into PFI contracts. A fundamental starting point to achieve this is to firstly re-learn the fundamental elements of sustainability. This paper presents this investigation.
With the aim was to establish the underpinning elements of sustainability within PFI contracts, a qualitative research method was used. The key findings were critically analyzed and the culminating findings were discussed. The findings suggest that whilst the key elements of sustainability can be identified, the challenge for incorporating them into the PFI contracts can be very vexing. This is especially with regard to its implementation when outlining the scope and role of the stakeholders in the PFI project.
Keywords-Private Financing Initiative (PFI); Government Services Projects; Sustainability and Green Elements; Construction Contracts

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are responsible for the largest proportion of biological science funding in the United States. To protect the public interest in access to publicly funded scientific research, the NIH amended terms and conditions in funding agreements after 2009, requiring funded Principal Investigators to deposit published copies of research in PubMed, an Open Access repository. Principal Investigators have partially complied with this depository requirement, and the NIH have signaled an intent to enforce grant agreement terms and conditions by stopping funding deposits and engaging in legal action. The global economic value of accessible knowledge offers a unique opportunity for courts to evaluate the impact of enforcing ‘openness’ contract terms and conditions within domestic and international economies for public and economic benefit.Through judicial enforcement of Open Access terms and conditions, the United States can increase economic efficiency for university libraries, academic participants, and public consumers, while accelerating global innovation, improving financial returns on science funding investments, and advancing more efficient scientific publishing models.

— Service contracts bind parties legally, regulating their behavior in the scope of a (business) service relationship. Given that there are legal consequences attached to service contracts, understanding the elements of a contract is key to managing services in an enterprise. After all, provisions in a service contract establish obligations and rights for service providers and customers that must be respected in service delivery. The importance of service contracts to service provisioning in an enterprise has motivated us to investigate their representation in enterprise models. We have observed that approaches fall into two extremes of a spectrum. Some approaches, such as ArchiMate, offer an opaque " contract " construct, not revealing the rights and obligations in the scope of the governed service relationship. Other approaches, under the umbrella term " contract languages " , are devoted exactly to the formal representation of the contents of contracts. Despite the applications of contract languages, they operate at a level of detail that does not match that of enterprise architecture models. In this paper, we explore the gap between these two extremes. We address the representation of service contract elements with a systematic approach: we first propose a well-founded service contract ontology, and then extend the ArchiMate language to reflect the elements of the service contract ontology. The applicability of the proposed extension is assessed in the representation of a real-world cloud service contract.

As the government increasingly uses commercial augmentation to perform many of its most basic functions, it is critically important that all employees understand the rules, expectations and boundaries that define the government-contractor relationship. The enormous shortfall of experienced acquisition personnel has left much of the burden of oversight and accountability to employees who are not trained in contracting regulations and procedures. Now, more than ever, all government employees and supervisors must possess a basic understanding of contract administration best practices and familiarity with rules and regulations governing the conduct of contractors in the workplace. This handbook introduces the fundamentals of managing government-contractor relations in a blended workforce.

In Contractors in the Government Workplace: Managing the Blended Workforce, author Glenn Voelz offers best practices and tips for employees and junior supervisors tasked with managing hybrid government-contractor teams. Focusing primarily on service-based contracting, the most rapidly expanding element of government acquisitions over the past decade, he provides an understanding of the tools, techniques, rules, and regulations relating to supervision of contractors in the workplace. He also discusses legal, ethical, and security tips to help avoid common mistakes and violations of Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) guidelines. Voelz explains in a straightforward way all aspects of government contracting that acquisition personnel need to know, including the basics of service-based contracting, the government-contractor relationship, acquisition team responsibilities, administration procedures, contract language, common mistakes government managers may make, methods of evaluation, Performance-Based Service Acquisitions, and ethical and legal concerns. An extensive bibliography supplements the text along with several appendices which include a glossary of key acquisition terms, a checklist for reviewing and analyzing contracts, tips for writing Performance Statements and Statements of Work, and guidelines for contingency contracting and contracting in forward locations or austere environments.