DFARS Proposal Adequacy Checklist - Is Your Proposal Current, Complete, and Accurate?

Today we'll wrap up our series on DoD's proposal adequacy checklist which became effective last March and applies to proposals where certified cost or pricing data is required. This checklist came out of a project of the Department's Panel on Contracting Integrity and was designed to consolidate existing regulatory requirements into a common checklist with the goal of reducing the number of inadequate pricing proposals that the Department received, thereby making the acquisition process more efficient.

As we've stated before, the checklist should help contractors ensure that they haven't inadvertently forgotten to consider a requirement of FAR or DFARS, or the contract solicitation itself. Its to the contractors advantage as well as the Government's to expedite the contracting process. Efficiency in anything improves the bottom line and that goes for proposal preparation practices as well.

Today we want to address Checklist Question No. 4 and caution contractors (and prospective contractors) to be very careful when answering this question. The question states:

Does the proposal disclose any other know activity that could materially impact the costs? This may include, but is not limited to such factors as
1. Vendor quotations;
2. Nonrecurring costs;
3. Information on changes in production methods and in production or purchasing volume;
4. Data supporting projections of business prospects and objectives and related operations costs
5. Unit-cost trends such as those associated with labor efficiency
6. Make-or-buy decisions;
7. Estimated resources to attain business goal; and
8. Information on management decisions that could have a significant bearing on costs.

Some of you might recognize this listing as the examples of cost or pricing data found in FAR 2.101. It's the same list. And, by listing these items in the checklist, the Government is reminding contractors of their duty to affirmatively disclose current, complete, and accurate cost or pricing data including those items specifically identified.

But what happens is a contractor fails to disclose this information at the time of proposal preparation. It is well understood that cost or pricing data must be certified as of the date of agreement on price. But this places an emphasis at the beginning of the process when, perhaps, many of these facts and decisions have not yet been fully fleshed out. Answering questions wrongly in this checklist could help make the Government's defective pricing case or even result in a fraud referral.

Don't take this question too lightly.