PROBLEMS WITH PAST PERFORMANCE

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in 2009 that “contracting officials” agreed that for past performance information to be useful for sharing, it must be documented, relevant, and reliable. However, GAO’s review of the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) data for fiscal years 2006 and 2007 indicates that only a small percentage of contracts had a documented performance assessment and that reluctance to rely more on past performance was due in part to skepticism about the reliability of the information and difficulty assessing relevance to specific acquisitions (GAO, 2009).