#government-contracting

#government-contracting

"After the DOGE actions to eviscerate USAID and pretty much punish many, many agencies and terminate thousands of contracts, I think the contractor community is tentative to actually enforce their rights," David Dixon, an attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, said Thursday as part of the law firm's DC Disrupted webinar series. Dixon said this question he is getting from contractors reveals the depth of their anxiety: Will the government retaliate against me for simply asking to be reimbursed for costs caused by the shutdown?

Services cover accounting and payroll, contracts administration, HR and recruiting, and compliance training. The model is designed to plug in cross-functionally, which helps founders and finance heads replace capacity gaps and move faster during growth spurts. The provider emphasizes hands-on compliance in areas GovCons face daily, including indirect rate structure, cost-volume development and workforce scaling aligned to contract needs. What stands out is the emphasis on small to midsize contractors who want enterprise-grade processes without building a large permanent team.

Deloitte has agreed to refund part of an Australian government contract after admitting it used generative AI to produce a report riddled with fake citations, phantom footnotes, and even a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgment. The consulting giant confirmed it would repay the final installment of its AU$440,000 ($291,245) agreement with Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) after the department re-uploaded a corrected version of the report late last week - conveniently timed for the weekend. The updated version strips out more than a dozen bogus references and footnotes, rewrites text, and fixes assorted typos, although officials insist the "substance" of the report remains intact. The work, commissioned last December, involved the Targeted Compliance Framework - the government's IT-driven system for penalizing welfare recipients who miss obligations such as job search appointments.

Paul Patterson, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd, emailed the government on January 24 last year [PDF] to clarify that until an inquiry into the scandal was complete, there was "no limitation or caveat on our intention to pause bidding for work with new Government customers." He said it would "only" continue bidding for public sector work if a new customer asked it to do so, or with existing customers "for example a contract extension or for similar work already undertaken by Fujitsu for that customer," or "for new opportunities with existing customers, where we have assessed and understood there to be a need [for] Fujitsu skills and capability."

The deals were part of GSA's OneGov strategy, in which the government streamlines the acquisition of services by operating as one entity; that way individual federal agencies don't have to negotiate their own separate deals.