Claire McCaskill

I have not heard enough acknowledgement from anybody from GSA that mistakes were made and that it should not have been done this way.

And you are telling me that you are in the middle of an Inspector General investigation and a letter turns up that you have not presented to the Inspector General?

So, your source for the document that you found was in fact the Missouri Department of Natural Resources as opposed to GSA.

If we now acknowledge at the end of the hearing that mistakes were made, then I have yet to see where anyone was held accountable for those mistakes.

They were willing to settle for boilerplate.

If it is inadvertent, it is incompetence; if it is not inadvertent, it is even more troubling.

And that is probably a subject for another hearing, how many people do we have working in public affairs in the Federal Government...

It is not always the sexiest topic that we handle in the Senate, but it is really important because of the amount of money that is spent on contracting in this government has exploded and the oversight, at the same time, has not been as…

I do want to underline what Ms. Ruwwe was so intent upon saying, because I think it is important to the people that work at Bannister.

This comes to accountability. This comes to Federal employees that have responsibilities and expertise, and they are paid accordingly.

This Subcommittee has spent a lot of time on contracting--on contracting officer representatives (CORs), and this was another weird thing about this contract...

This is exactly the kind of thing that allows the public to get deep-rooted cynicism about the way we spend money.

So, you go to the people that work for you and you say to them, why did we not produce the letter; correct?

I would think that would be something you would want to know.

I do not think you issued it.

I believe it was the day after the IG investigation was requested by Senator Bond.

Now, you understand that this is problematic.

Well, because it was an extension of an existing contract that came under the 100,000, it stayed within the parameters of the original contract instead of kicking in that $100,000 threshold that causes more oversight; correct?

So, you think it would be typical and good contracting practice to allow the contractor to write the work that was going to be performed, as opposed to the government laying out the work that they needed performed?

And why was the EPA asking a contractor to write a scope of work for the GSA?

I am curious where that came from, and did you do that with all the regional appointments?

And the press continues.

I perfectly well understand that the problems we are going to talk about today in contracting apply to every Federal agency.

But it is true that this contract came right in under what would have kicked in a lot of--more oversight of the contract; correct?

My concern, because we are talking about the confidence of the public in what we do, is that we can sure make mistakes, but we are not covering up and we are not intending to mislead people.