Federal Contracts Depend on The Report Card – Business

July 26th, 2011 › immigration laws › admin ›

Before the federal agency contracting officer (CO) considers doing business together with you, he/she looks at your report card. No, not the one together with comments from your English trainer about your studiousness (or shortage thereof), but your federal report greeting card.

That report card, known as CPAR (Company Performance Assessment Report) measures your company’s past overall performance on federal contracts. Any CPAR is not required on every agreement – generally, only upon contracts over $100,000 — but the threshold varies for some services, such as ship repair ($500,000), Information Technology ($1 million), plus some other categories.

The CPAR on your deal can lag well behind the contract itself, since the CPAR is not needed until at least 12 months following the contract was awarded. However, it will be done: FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) 9-105.2(my partner and i) require the agency CO to finish a CPAR for any contract above the threshold amount.

What does the actual CPAR list? Your company’s overall effort on the contract and whether your company met crucial milestones listed in the contract, in addition to grades for specific tasks and functions within that agreement. Was company management responsive to the agency? Were subcontractors properly managed? Were costs predict and managed accurately (not applicable for firm-fixed-price or firm-fixed-price with economic price adjustment contracts)? Did the quality of your products or services meet/exceed the contract? In short, almost anything a Corp who was about to award that you simply contract would want to know about your speed and agility on previous contracts is on your CPAR.

The good news is that you can notice what COs have said about your company and add your own personal comments and explanations. To do this, you must first enter an advertising Partner Identification Number (MPIN) in your profile in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) system (http://www.ccr.gov/). If your organization is already registered in CCR, you’ll be asked for your DUNS number (from Dun & Bradstreet) and Transaction Partner Identification Number (TPIN) when you update your contractor profile to include the past efficiency point of contact as well as MPIN. With that information, visit http://www.ppirs.gov/ to be able to login and see your corporation’s information. (If you’ve developed a great relationship with your CO throughout the life of a contract, and even disseminated about what he/she plans to put on the particular CPAR, there shouldn’t be any surprises.)

Note that a less than stellar CPAR on the contract won’t necessarily preclude your company from winning long term contracts; nor will any 100% positive CPAR guarantee you’ll acquire the next one. But, like a optimistic comment from that Language teacher, it couldn’t harm.