The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed six ways to help streamline the acquisition process and improve the acquisition environment, intended to be included in the FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The second proposal is to do away with the Defense Cost Accounting Standard Board (CASB). The issue here is that there is a Defense CASB, and there’s a federal one as well. The result is, unfortunately, is that the two different sets of cost accounting standards created can often be, well, different. So what this OMB initiative is going to try and do is eliminate the Defense CASB and consolidate everything into this one place under the federal board.
Of course, not everyone is going to be happy about this. There will be differences between the standards, and things from the Defense CASB that somebody’s been taking advantage of and doesn’t want to give up, or conversely, anything changed from the Federal CASB will have proponents and systems that cater to that function. We’ll have to figure out what those things are. Reconciling these two will be a nightmare, but it’s always better to have one rather than two things carrying out the same function.
And don’t forget that there are computer systems that handle acquisition and contract issues and cost accounting, and those will need to be adjusted.
What this demonstrates is that nothing in contracting and acquisition is ever as simple as “just do this.” So much of our regulated activity gets caught up in the very regulations being implemented; it’s never simple to change.
But, we’ll keep working on it…
