Posts Tagged ‘US federal government’
Federal rules, orders and audits on buying, and what they show every buyer.
In the book: Chapter 1: The Illusion of Value (1) · Chapter 4: The Information Asymmetry Collapse (1) · Chapter 7: Value Is Not Promised; It Is Proven (1) · Chapter 8: The Buyer Lifecycle Is Progressive Governance (1) · Chapter 9: The Value Control Loop (2) · Chapter 15: The Value Lattice System (1) · Chapter 16: MAVEN: Controlled Evaluation (1) · Chapter 17: VIGOR: Governance and Realization (2)
A Federal IT Fund Required Savings Estimates but Not Savings
A federal modernization fund required a savings estimate with every proposal, and repayment did not depend on the savings arriving. Eight years later its administrator and its auditor count the results differently.
Read MoreAmtrak Paid for Hours With No Measure of What They Produced
An Amtrak audit questioned nearly all the spending on a technology contract over missing paperwork. The contract paid for hours and had no explicit performance measures, so nobody could show what the hours produced.
Read MoreFederal Contract Reviews Will Ask Six Questions, None on Results
Federal buyers must review their schedule purchase agreements in writing every year. Under the acquisition overhaul that review is going from three items to six, and none asks what the purchase produced.
Read MoreRewritten US Federal Quality Rules Never Check the Result
The federal quality rules were rebuilt from a blank page last year. The word verify appears three times in them, and none of the three asks what the purchase was supposed to produce.
Read MoreA US Executive Order Demands ROI but Assigns No One to Prove It
Executive Order 14402 exists to achieve demonstrable returns on investment. Every duty it creates lands before the solicitation goes out, and nobody is assigned to establish afterwards that the return arrived.
Read MoreAuditors Couldn’t Find the Data Behind a Program’s Savings Claims
A federal buying program cleared its coverage target. The savings it exists to produce were reported on a fraction of the same spend, and the evidence connecting the two was not available.
Read MoreA Senate Bill on AI Agents Sets Conditions on the Buyer
The first federal text on AI agents does not ask the software to behave well. It specifies conditions the arrangement must have, and most enterprises cannot meet one of them internally.
Read MoreYour Contract’s Audit Right Can’t Tell You If the Purchase Worked
A buyer with a right to audit can examine everything the seller spent and still learn nothing about whether the thing it bought worked. Those are two different rights, and most contracts carry only one.
Read MoreWhen Vendors Call Your Terms ‘Uncustomary,’ Keep Them
When a buyer writes its own standard, sellers seldom call it wrong; they call it uncustomary. GSA’s AI clause drew exactly that objection, and its final text kept the precedence rule industry had asked it to revisit.
Read MoreThe US Government’s AI Contract Clause Tests Everything but Value
The largest buyer on earth claimed the right to test its AI vendors on terms it alone controls, and attached consequences to everything except whether the value arrived.
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