Senator rips into investigation of Sun GSA contract

A U.S. senator who has repeatedly criticized a government contract with Sun Microsystems, raised private concerns about an auditor’s investigation of that contract at the same time he was blasting Sun and the contracting agency on the Senate floor.

Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, ripped into the government contracting agency the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and Sun during a speech on the Senate floor Oct. 17.

What Grassley didn’t mention in his floor speech were his concerns about the original investigation into the Sun contract, conducted by the GSA Office of Inspector General (OIG). In a letter to GSA Inspector General Brian Miller, also dated Oct. 17, Grassley said the OIG’s investigative reports were “incomplete, poorly organized and lacked basic information.”

An internal investigation conducted by Grassley’s office found that GSA executives “put pressure on the contract officer to sign a potentially bad contract,” Grassley said on the Senate floor. “All the evidence suggests that this particular contractor had been overcharging the government for years.”

The GSA’s inspector general has accused Sun of overcharging government agencies by more than $25 million in contracts dating back to June 1997. Sun and GSA Administrator Lurita Doan have painted the issue as a personality conflict between Doan and Miller. After Doan took office in May 2006, she tried to cut the OIG’s budget, saying the office was intimidating GSA employees and was getting improper funding from inside the GSA.

Grassley, in the letter to Miller, repeated his concerns that Sun was overcharging the U.S. government, saying it was a “blatant” violation, but he also criticized OIG for taking three years to complete its audit of the Sun contract. The OIG “failed to use every tool at its disposal to extract the required information from Sun,” Grassley wrote in the letter, obtained by IDG News Service.

Grassley’s office didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Sun, still facing a lawsuit in Arkansas over government contracting procedures, canceled the GSA contract in mid-September. It did not give a reason for backing away from the contract, but said it would continue to fulfill other government contracts. The company “took this step reluctantly,” Sun said in a statement then.

Sun did not respond to a request for comments. Sun has denied overcharging the government.

“Our pricing is very often better than our competitors, and the contract offers the government extremely aggressive discounts and contractual protections,” Sun said in an August statement. “To our knowledge, neither Senator Grassley’s staff nor GSA’s Inspector General have attempted to determine how Sun’s contract compares to other major GSA computer vendors.”

Miller also declined to comment on the specific concerns raised in the Grassley letter. Through a spokesman, he said that Doan’s calls for an investigation of OIG by the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, were “dismissed, just as her other similar complaints have been dismissed.”

Grassley, in his letter, also suggests that OIG auditors overstepped their bounds by becoming “directly and actively involved in the Sun contract negotiations.” OIG should conduct training courses to “help auditors better understand exactly where the fine line between oversight and management actually lies in contract negotiations,” Grassley wrote.

OIG also did not interview the primary witness and source of the allegations in one case, Grassley said. Reports on its investigation lacked basic information, and “the exact words spoken by witnesses during interviews were not identified and enclosed in quotes,” he wrote.

Finally, OIG failed to directly notify Doan about specific allegations, as required by law, Grassley said. Past communications with Doan have been “poor to nonexistent,” Grassley wrote. OIG is required by law to make regular reports to Doan, he said.