I just had a conversation with a federal employee last week talking about the issue of procurement offices being a blackbox and procurement officers not understanding the technical specifics of what they're bidding out. His solution was just to become certified as a procurement officer (apparently it's 72 hours of coursework) and deal with the bids himself. He said these kinds of problems have pretty much disappeared for him since then.
> His solution was just to become certified as a procurement officer (apparently it's 72 hours of coursework) and deal with the bids himself. He said these kinds of problems have pretty much disappeared for him since then.
sounds like a loophole one can procure a truck through :)
He's overseeing the bidding process for contractors for projects that he will supervise; he doesn't personally benefit from the outcome of the selection (i.e., he doesn't own stock in companies that are bidding or anything like that), so I'm not sure how it would be a conflict.
