Safety is crucial to not only survival but victory. Our nation’s government aims to fulfill this role as a premier world leader overseeing the world’s premier marketplace. At last check they spent over $600B in goods and services to fulfill their end of the bargain. They even make a plethora of materials transparent to help you help them. Don’t be scared. When it comes to contracting inside the federal space, the primary concern is safety because that’s what good leaders do. That begins with ethics.
Transparency In Making Important disclosures
Each year, each agency receives appropriations granted by Congress which are transparent.
Each agency uses contract vehicles to spend that money. Those expenditures are public knowledge.
Each contract is attached to a solicitation which not only depicts the perimeters of a project but its legal statutes as well. You can look at as many of those as your heart desires.
Those regulations are also public knowledge. You can view the FAR as well as any applicable agency supplements.
Protecting Proprietary Information
The only things you cannot know are how the good is made, how the service is specifically enacted and how those prices were constructed.
The government goes to great lengths not only to practice cyber security but to keep safe trade secrets or business information concerning involved parties.
COs are sworn to secrecy and can show not even a hint of conflict of interest. You’ll have to ask the politicians yourself why friends and family keep obtaining lucrative consulting deals, large contract awards and inside trade secrets. Sometimes, knowledge just slips out but if it’s considered to be public knowledge then it is not a crime. A fed’s workday is different than yours and remember that they are the biggest buyer in the whole world!
Avoiding Conflicts Of Interest
FAR Part 3 houses the potential improprieties of a CO. Don’t forget that they are only potential until they occur and become real. These instances are listed within these regulations because they have actually occurred before and became real!
Rest assured that your assign CO receives annual training as to be reminded of the high standard of ethics that our national government attempts to uphold. To paraphrase the warden in “The Shawshank Redemption”, “Your heart belongs to the Lord, but your ass, it belongs to the taxpayer.”
High principles of ethics are not only upheld amidst the government and the vendor. They are upheld in every contracting shop as well. Failure to uphold such ethics will result in suspension of task or warrant and in some cases job loss.
In order to create transparency and remove any deception concerning conflict of interest, I conducted 95% of my business via electronic mail. I wanted paper trails and I have paper trails. From the beginning to the end of my nine and a half years of federal service, I have proof that the only thing I wanted was to give the opportunity for the vendor to succeed and the government to maximize taxpayer dollars by being as prudent as necessary in establishing and succeeding by way of fair and reasonable negotiation methodologies as a trusted business partner. My boss kept telling me that I should use the phone instead but that only created duplicity because I had to send an email recap right after the phone conversation was over. He started work there when I started kindergarten. Old habits die hard.
Our federal government has placed parameters on its business processes because they want them to remain safe. They want you to feel safe. They want our citizens to remain safe. That being said, there’s a lot of information out there. It’s good information but you Gotta know where to find it. Knowing where to find it is the frustration and the frustration turns into anger and that anger is projected to understand that the federal government is out to squash the little guy. That could be further from the truth. The truth is, every CO inside the federal government is so busy that they don’t have time to tell you where to look. That’s where I was different. I sacrificed my procurement administrative lead time to get my vendors to the right answer. Most of them don’t do that. Furthermore, most.DOCs and SESs don’t look inside the numbers to find out why PALT isn’t met, either.
I’m here to help you ease that frustration. I’m here to help you find the answers. I’m here to help you write the proposal. I’m here to help steer your business towards award and beyond.
If you think I can help then email nicholas.s.robertson@outlook.com for your introductory email and free consultation.
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RobertsonKX Business Blog 