Past Performance: How a Weak Rating Follows a Vendor for Years

Federal agencies grade their own contractors. The Federal Acquisition Regulation requires a written past performance review for every contract above the simplified acquisition threshold. The write-up comes at least once a year and again when the work ends. It goes into CPARS, the governmentwide database that buying officers read before the next award. The record stays with the business unit that did the work. The design prices risk before money moves. Strong performers build a paper edge; weak ones carry the evidence with them. The bottleneck is input. A 2014 GAO review of past performance reporting found compliance rates from 13 to 83 percent as of April 2014 across the ten largest agencies. Most had missed the targets set by the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. Where reports land late, the file runs on stale data. The same mechanics-first reading drives how a ranked-choice vote count actually works, and this piece follows the site's federal contracting coverage.

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