Air Force Materiel Command has helped the government save approximately $1.3B by countering fraudulent activities in U.S. Air Force procurement efforts.

AFMC personnel investigate the majority of all fraud cases related to electronics, hardware, software and labor services for the military branch, Air Force said Tuesday.

Six command attorneys have trained at least 15K government workers over the past decade on how to detect contracting fraud.

The Hanscom AF Base in Massachusetts will host on Oct. 30 a Northeast Fraud Working Group meeting that seeks to help the installation’s staff members spot illegal or dishonest behavior during the weapons acquisition process.

Vice President Mike Pence has said the establishment of a “space force” as the sixth military branch seeks to address the “lack of centralized leadership and accountability” over programs that aim to promote national security in space.

Pence said Tuesday at the National Space Council’s fourth meeting at the National Defense University that the council would vote on six recommendations for the proposed roadmap to form the new service, which he says would help sort out the “fragmented responsibilities” over national security space initiatives.

He mentioned plans for the creation of a unified combatant command and a space development agency and a joint review between the National Space Council and National Security Council to assess space authorities that would provide warfighters the leeway to counter space-based threats.

The Trump administration will work with Congress in the next few months to include in the next National Defense Authorization Act provisions to establish the space-focused service by 2020, Pence noted.

Pence also cited the government’s partnerships with the private sector to build up the country’s launch systems and expedite the delivery of new space capabilities through the Launch Service Agreements.
 

Two House Appropriations Committee members have asked the Defense Department’s office of inspector general to investigate the requirements and solicitation process for the potential 10-year, $10B Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

Reps. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) wrote a letter Monday to Glenn Fine, acting inspector general at DoD, to raise concern over the contract’s Defense Information Systems Agency impact level 6 requirement that a cloud service provider should meet.

The lawmakers said they think that requirement is one of the limiting or “gating” provisions of the contract that “seem to be tailored to one specific contractor.”

Cole and Womack also called on the inspector general to investigate why the Pentagon continues to pursue a contract structure that has drawn criticism from industry and Congress.

The Pentagon released its request for proposals in July for the JEDI program with plans to issue a single-sourced contract.

The report said DoD intends to award the cloud contract in early 2019.
 

The Federal Acquisition Service and Internal Revenue Service are looking into modernizing their technical assets to modify and streamline their contracting processes, Federal News Network reported Monday.

General Services Administration Administrator Emily Murphy noted at the 2018 ImagineNation ELC conference that she aims for FAS to rethink procurement operations as it simplifies its schedules program.

She added that technologies such as robotics process automation, machine learning and business process re-engineering will help contracting officers focus on procuring systems according to specific data and business needs.

FAS Commissioner Alan Thomas also disclosed at the conference that the service will leverage GSA’s CIO Application Maintenance, Enhancements, and Operations recompete effort to modernize contracting systems.

“Within six months, we will have the requirements for our new contracting writing system out to industry, and by the back half of 2019, we expect to begin delivering new capabilities,” he said.

Meanwhile, IRS has procured a robotics process automation system to review the financial and business transactions of contractors.

Tim Shaughnessy, a senior program analyst at the IRS, explained that the bot will be in charge of monitoring a vendor’s status on the System for Award Management or SAM.gov website and other platforms, as well as collect proposals from interested vendors.

IRS has also started testing a pilot program under Parts 12 and 13 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation to help agencies speed up the review process for new systems procured through contracts worth less than $7M.

Max Everett, chief information officer of the Energy Department, has said that preparing a business case for a Technology Modernization Fund proposal has changed the way his agency approaches information technology programs, MeriTalk reported Monday.

The TMF Board in June approved a DOE project proposal to migrate federal email to the cloud, awarding the agency $15M in funding.

The TMF website says that a successful proposal must be able to articulate the savings and lasting financial impact that a project would bring about. A successful proposal must also determine how the agency will repay the TMF.

Everett said his agency was able to build a compelling business case because some of the department’s segments had already performed email cloud migration. The agency was, therefore, already familiar with the savings brought on by such a move. All that was left to do was calculate the cost of non-cloud email implementations.

Everett noted that by preparing a business case, “you quickly start to understand the savings,” and added that he and his agency “want to make sure that all of the IT projects, all of the things we’re looking at, that we’re doing that sort of business case analysis.”

The Labor Department has proposed a rule that seeks to help American small businesses offer association retirement plans to their employees.

The department said Monday the proposal aims to provide minor enterprises, sole proprietors and professional employer organizations access to retirement plans such as 401(k) packages for their workers.

“Many small businesses would like to offer retirement benefits to their employees, but are discouraged by the cost and complexity of running their own plans,” said Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta.

He explained that the association retirement plans will allow employers to perform minimal effort in offering retirement benefits.

The department also plans to save costs and guide small businesses in discussions with financial institutions through the effort.

Around 38M workers in the private sector have no access to a retirement plan via their employers, the department reported.

The White House seeks help from Silicon Valley companies in employing personnel for the government’s technology modernization initiatives, the Washington Post reported Monday.

The Trump administration aims to coordinate with firms such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM for the recruitment of technical workers, which has been a government-wide problem due to excessively thorough hiring and security clearance processes and low compensation for public service.

Encouraging technology professionals to serve the public at some point in their career will help bring benefits to the country in the long run, according to an unnamed source from the government.

However, big companies are concerned that sharing their employees with the state will produce conflicts of interest when it comes to politics, according to the report.

White House officials assured the public that it will protect technical workers from any political disputes with their employers, the report added.

Avi Bender, director of the Commerce Department’s National Technical Information Service, told FedScoop in an interview published Monday that the federal government should identify innovative approaches to shared services implementation and consider additional procurement instruments that are suitable for data management.

“Data management is an ongoing innovation effort that requires continuous and iterative learning, continuous agility and discovery of new opportunities,” he said.

“And sometimes the contract mechanism or the [Federal Acquisition Regulation] is not ideally suited for that, so I think we need to look at different acquisition instruments.”

Bender noted that federal agencies should consider themselves as “big data organizations” and emphasized the need to build up the workforce to support data-centric programs and information technology modernization.

He also cited how NTIS works to help agencies address issues through private sector collaboration.