IIBEC Educates Florida City About Problems Associated with Job-Order Contracting

By John Boling

Earlier this month the city of Tampa, Florida, released an internal audit of its recently enacted cooperative purchasing job-order contracting (JOC) program. IIBEC, in a letter signed by its Executive Vice President and CEO Brian Pallasch and by IIBEC Florida Chapter President Ricardo Moncada, took the opportunity to educate the Internal Audit Department about problems associated with JOC for design and construction services. Along with the letter, the RCI-IIBEC Foundation report, An Analysis of Unit-Price Procurement, and IIBEC’s Safeguarding Taxpayer Funds During Procurement of Design and Construction Services policy recommendations also were sent to the department.

Focusing on management, the audit concluded that internal controls and the administration of the program needed to be improved. It also found the JOC program complied with protocols for managing change orders, but the accuracy of performance metrics, although relevant, were not accurate. Read the audit here.

In the letter, IIBEC urges policymakers and procurement officials to focus on the following policy changes:

• Ensure the independence of the design professional.
• Keep public health and safety paramount.
• Avoid including specifications for products with a single source.
• Require full and open competition in all public procurements.
• Use qualifications-based selection (QBS) for procurement of all design services.

The IIBEC letter also promotes and recommends that public entities require the use of credentialed professionals. According to Pallasch, “Local governments would be well served by requiring credentials for building design services. Even if they are not mandated by local laws or regulations, relevant credentials can be included as a factor in the qualifications-based selection process used to procure construction design professionals.”

IIBEC will continue to take every opportunity to educate procurement officials about the inherent problems association with cooperative procurement on design and construction projects, but IIBEC cannot read every newspaper or local report. If you see something related to QBS, cooperative purchasing, or job-order contracting that you think is important, please send it to procurement@iibec.org. We’ll take it from there.