Up to 60% of all federal procurement spending happens at the end of the fiscal year, leaving little time for the government to conduct thorough contractor performance assessments.

And while self-assessments have emerged as a potential solution to the challenges of the contractor performance assessment ratings reporting process, Michael Derrios, the senior procurement executive at the State Department, said vendors rarely submit their self-assessments.

“Little to none,” Derrios said when asked what percentage of CPARS include vendor self-assessments. “It’s an incredibly underutilized tool. We would love to see more of it.”

“I will be the first to admit that our ratings at the State Department are not high. It’s challenging, and it almost always happens at the end of the fiscal year. It’s hard for people to find the time to do it. I also think there’s something skittish on the government side about, ‘I don’t want to really engage in a conflict with you.’ But if there’s a self-assessment that can serve as a starting point for that dialog, I think that kind of breaks the ice.”

Too often, there is little to no engagement between the vendor and the government from the beginning of the contract performance, so continuous communication throughout the contract period to avoid any surprises when CPARS ratings are finalized is crucial, said Derrios. “If any of you are ever shocked and surprised by a bad CPARS rating — somebody on the contract probably needs to get fired. Your program manager is not doing their job if they’re shocked that there’s a bad rating.”

“The dialog has to be happening throughout the year, and it’s almost like you have to be writing your CPARS the entire time with direct questions like, ‘How do you think this is going to play into CPARS ratings? You have to be that direct about the dialog.”

Dion Turner, the supervisory contracting officer at the Interior Department, said while CPARS can be somewhat subjective based on the contracting officer, documentation is key to ensuring fair evaluations.

“What’s not subjective is your documentation and what you did performing under that contract. One of the things I try to push is it’s not just about putting in rebuttals. That’s another reason why I’m a huge fan of the self-assessments because we should see your performance in the highlights that you have, even the ones that we have problems that the government didn’t know about that you resolved, but you did, just performing normally on the contract. Those are the types of things that I like to push for documenting your performance.”

“From a government’s perspective, I always push to have those conversations early on and to ensure you’re talking about performance. From a business perspective, you don’t know what to fix if you don’t know that there’s a problem and that leads to us having a project on the government side that may not go to full fruition or may have performance problems. At the end of the day, we’re always pushing for that win, win. It’s just a matter of how you document that,” said Turner.

Getting exceptional rating is possible even if you encounter problems

Contractors can still get an exceptional rating even after encountering progress — it’s more important how a company recovers from setbacks.

Soraya Correa, former chief procurement officer at the Department of Homeland Security and the CEO of the National Industries for the Blind, said contractors tend to hesitate to admit any contract problems during self-evaluation, but most of the time the strategy is counterproductive.

“Believe it or not, a lot of times it’s okay to have something go wrong. It’s how you recover. I’ll be very honest with you when I’m looking at self-assessment, if you tell me you’re great and wonderful and walk on water and never made a mistake — frankly, I don’t want you on my team. I want people that know how to recover from problems, know how to address failures and how to solve issues,” said Correa.

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