Construction contracts are open across the federal government, and the Army Corps of Engineers and the General Services Administration are most in need. The Government Accountability Office looked at the how these agencies approach changes in contracts, and found that there needs to be more data on how changes impact businesses. Bill Woods, director of contracting and national security acquisitions issues at GAO, says that there were a few problems in the process.
“The Corps of Engineers had some data for us, and they were able to demonstrate that about half of their changes took less than 60 days. Of course, the other side of that equation is that many changes are taking much longer than 60 days,” Woods said. “In some instances, changes were taking more than a year to process. You can imagine that has a significant impact on the cash flow of small businesses.”