Give yourself credit if you guessed "ArmorGroup North America Inc." (AGNA) and the "Lord of the Flies" environment they oversaw in the housing camp for U.S embassy guards in Kabul, Afghanistan, which our friends over at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) exposed back in 2009.

Earlier this month, AGNA, the private security company and subsidiary of the British security services conglomerate G4S, settled a whistleblower's lawsuit associated with the scandal, agreeing to pay a $7.5 million fine. Importantly, though, the contractor settled the suit without an admission of fault or liability, effectively sweeping the incident under the rug with regard to future considerations of government contracts.

Any future contracting officials seeking to determine ArmorGroup's integrity and trustworthiness will not see the incident listed in the government's top contracting performance database, the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS).

Currently, FAPIIS only displays lawsuits or administrative actions taken by federal, state, or local governments where there is an admission of fault or liability by the contractor. And guess what contractors always demand whenever they settle something out of court; yup, immunity from any finding of fault, keeping many of the worst contracting abuses out of the government's databases and away from the eyes of contracting officials.

In AGNA's case, that includes allegations of the company blatantly disregarding "its obligations to ensure the safety and security of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul" – according to the whistleblower who sued – and other assorted nefarious activities – according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Wrongdoings include:

• "AGNA submitted false claims for payment on a State Department contract to provide armed guard services at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan";
• "[I]n 2007 and 2008, AGNA guards violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) by visiting brothels in Kabul, and that AGNA’s management knew about the guards’ activities";
• "AGNA misrepresented the prior work experience of 38 third country national guards it had hired to guard the Embassy"; and
• "AGNA failed to comply with certain Foreign Ownership, Control and Influence mitigation requirements on the embassy contract, and on a separate contract to provide guard services at a Naval Support Facility in Bahrain."

Those seem like some important pieces of information that a contracting official might want to take into consideration if choosing between ArmorGroup and one of its modestly more responsible competitors when determining the award of a future federal contract.

Of course, contracting officials – and the public for that matter – could see this information if Congress simply passed some common sense contracting transparency reforms. Last spring, then-Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduced a bi-partisan bill including just such reforms.

Included in the legislation was language to pull into FAPIIS "records of any administrative proceeding entered into by a contractor at any level of government" no matter the finding of fault or liability. There was also a provision "increasing the length of time from five years to 10 that a contractor's past performance record on a government contract" would stay in the database.

The legislation ingloriously died in committee, however, and with Sen. Feingold now out of the Senate, the transparency community needs a new champion to step up in Congress and push for these basic contracting reforms.

Image by Flickr user johnsolid used under a Creative Commons license.

This morning, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform unanimously approved the DATA Act (PDF). And that's a problem, because now it's headed to the House floor with a number of provisions we have serious concerns about.

The DATA Act is fatally flawed in several ways, and we noted the two most problematic provisions in the bill when we stated our opposition to it: that all the measures in the bill are slated to sunset in seven years and that it would repeal FFATA, the law that created USAspending.gov.

To be clear, OMB Watch is supportive of the majority of bill's provisions. It would essentially extend and improve Recovery Act-style recipient reporting and establish an independent agency modeled after the highly effective Recovery Board to oversee federal spending transparency. Most importantly, it would allow us to see far down the sub-contracting chain to see the ultimate recipients of federal funds.

But by repealing FFATA, the bill would actually take spending transparency a few steps back, because FFATA contains a number of data elements that are required to be reported that the DATA Act does not. And unless Congress acts to reauthorize the bill in 2018, the spending information that appears on USAspending.gov and all the other spending transparency created by the DATA Act will disappear. We shouldn't have to be reconsidering whether spending transparency is necessary every seven years or worried that a polarized Congress finding itself in a legislative stalemate will fail to agree on approving time-sensitive legislation.

That transparency advocates on the Oversight Committee -- most notably Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) -- voted to approve such a dangerous proposition is confounding. Issa noted his years-long effort to pass this bill, and yet included a countdown timer for the bill's life. In his opening statement, Cummings explicitly noted his concerns about the sunset provision and the repeal of FFATA along with several other issues he sees in the bill, and yet still agreed to go along with the rest of the committee in moving this bill to a full House vote.

Besides the repeal of FFATA and the sunsetting of the Act itself, there are many other issues where the bill needs improvements. It includes a broad, vague power for the Board to exempt recipients of federal funds from reporting, and a nomination process for the Board's chair that could leave the agency leaderless for years. Based on our experience of helping write FFATA and our experience working with OMB implementing the law, there are other technical changes we think essential. For example, the DATA Act appropriately targets improving data quality. But its solution will not result on better data, just more of it. To get an accurate picture of federal outlays, it is important to obtain data from the government check writer, the Treasury Department.

I would like to point out that the markup session was not for naught. A pair of amendments by Reps. Mike Quigley (D-IL) and Jackie Speier (D-CA) that were added to the bill are welcomed additions. Quigley's amendment would require the board created by the act to determine the feasibility of including tax expenditures on the new spending transparency website. Speier's would require that the board to emphasize finding waste, fraud, and abuse in sole-sourced federal contracts.

A companion version of the DATA Act was introduced by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) but without the sunset provision. Yet it still contains the FFATA repeal. Let's hope the Senate spends some time deliberating the merits of these and other issues before that chamber votes on the DATA Act.

Consumer product safety risks would be concealed and influence peddling in government contracting would remain out of public view under the provisions of the fiscal year (FY) 2012 spending bill approved today by the House Financial Services and General Government appropriations subcommittee.

The bill would prohibit the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) from expending funds on its consumer product safety database. Congress required CPSC to establish the database in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, in response to a string of high-profile product recalls. The bill passed both houses with overwhelming support and was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

CPSC launched the database at SaferProducts.gov on March 11. In spite of the recent congressional support for the database, corporate allies have attacked the database because they want to shield their products from scrutiny, ostensibly due to information quality concerns.

The same provision was included in the House spending bill for FY 2011, H.R. 1, which passed in February but which the Senate rejected. The bill which ultimately became law, H.R. 1473, did not include such a restriction. However, H.R. 1473 did require the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a study on the database's information quality, which GAO has not yet completed. Apparently the subcommittee isn't waiting for the facts.

The bill also would prohibit agencies from expending any funds to implement President Obama's draft executive order on contractor disclosure should he sign it. The move would head off the draft order, which would require potential federal contractors and vendors to disclose their political contributions to the public as a condition of bidding on a government contract.

The anti-disclosure rider is one of several approaches pushed by big business, including a provision in the House defense authorization bill and standalone bills introduced in both houses of Congress. The draft order would help to root out pay-to-play in government contracting and cover part of the gaping hole created by the Citizens United case, which allowed a deluge of undisclosed corporate money into elections.

The same bill contains the E-Gov Fund, which would be slightly restored after deep cuts in FY 2011, but which might not be enough to save important transparency sites such as USAspending.gov and Data.gov.

This morning, Vice President Joe Biden announced a major initiative to identify and eliminate government waste – the “Campaign to Cut Waste.” As Biden was announcing the initiative, President Obama issued a new executive order authorizing the main components of the campaign. The expansion of accountability measures for federal spending is a welcome and productive move by the administration.

The new effort seeks to build off the success of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (Recovery Board) overseeing the hundreds of billions spent under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus bill. Biden credited the Recovery Board with keeping fraud and waste at an all-time low for recovery spending, thanks to new computer modeling and data analysis tools. Biden stressed the importance of deterring fraud before it ever occurs and praised the work of Earl Devaney, chair of the Recovery Board, for establishing a model that can be applied to all of government.

The executive order, “Delivering an Efficient, Effective, and Accountable Government,” expands aspects of the Recovery Act oversight to operate government-wide. First, the E.O. establishes an Accountable Government Initiative that will require cabinet-level agencies to regularly meet with the vice president to discuss progress on identifying waste. This type of regular oversight discussions with agency officials was seen as successful for the Recovery Board. The goals of the Accountable Government Initiative were first announced last September through an OMB memo from OMB Deputy Director for Management Jeffrey Zients, who is also the federal Chief Performance Officer.

The E.O. also assigned responsibilities to other officials, including Zients, who will lead on identifying practices that should be adopted across agencies and in facilitating reforms that require cross-agency coordination and cooperation. The director of OMB will provide agencies with guidance for identifying program overlap and duplication for the FY 2013 budget process. Within agencies, Chief Operating Officers are designated as the Senior Accountable Officials responsible for leading performance and management reform efforts, while the Chief Financial Officers will be responsible for achieving agency cost savings.

The E.O. also establishes a new Government Accountability and Transparency (GAT) Board to be made up of 11 members designated by the president from among agency Inspectors General, agency Chief Financial Officers or Deputy Secretaries, a senior official from OMB, and such other members as the president designates. This board, similar in responsibility to the Recovery Board, will provide strategic direction to agencies on this campaign and regularly report to the vice president. The board is also tasked to with reporting to the vice president in six months with proposals for integrating systems that collect and display government spending.

It is likely that Devaney will play a leadership role in the GAT Board, since Biden introduced Devaney and heavily praised him. Even as such, there was no formal announcement that Devaney or other members of the Recovery Board will be selected to be part of the new GAT Board or if the administration will simply seek to recreate the successful effort with new people. The Recovery board is set to expire in 2013 with the final expenditures under the Recovery Act.

Biden noted that the creation of the GAT Board is being coordinated in a bipartisan fashion with members of Congress. Demonstrating that support, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) plans to introduce a bill at any moment that transforms the Recovery Board into a Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Board (FAST Board). The FAST Board would consolidate USAspending.gov, Recovery.gov, and other federal spending websites and oversee a new website or portal to websites. The FAST Board would also have oversight responsibility like the GAT Board to prevent waste and fraud in government spending.