VA/SPAWAR Deal: No SEWP

The Veterans Affairs Department has an instruction in place that all information technology purchases go through the governmentwide Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP), managed by NASA.

Evidently, that instruction does not apply to the work that the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) Atlantic performs for the VA IT shop under an interagency agreement.

The VA Inspector General said in a report released yesterday that the VA Office of Information and Technology did direct SPAWAR to use SEWP to acquire information technology hardware and software in Amendment 19 to the interagency agreement.

But, Amendment 20 to that agreement strikes that requirement and instead allows SPAWAR to follow its own (rather than the VA's) acquisition policies and use contract vehicles that provide "best value to the government," according to the report. The report said that it could not find any documentation that a waiver to use contracts other than SEWP had ever been processed.

Stephen Warren, principal deputy assistant secretary in the VA's Office of Information and Technology, told me that SPAWAR has its own pre-negotiated set of contracts for IT acquisition. He indicated that he believed SPAWAR could get a better deal this way than SEWP, but is planning on following up on this with me.