In one of my first official contract actions in Afghanistan in 2007, I made a common but avoidable mistake, and the result serves as a good lesson for both industry and government contracting personnel – that it is important to do the right thing, for both the government and the contractor. I cannot recall the exact details, but I had only been in the country for a few weeks and had never held a warrant before. My experience to that point was as a non-warranted contracting specialist preparing Simplified Acquisition Procedures (SAP) awards for the COs to sign, back at home station in Germany. There, we used the Procurement Desktop – Defense (PD2) contract writing system, which was the Department of Defense Standard Procurement System, or SPS. But in Afghanistan at that time, the Regional Contracting Centers did not have PD2, but instead used Microsoft Word templates, and a lot of cut and paste efforts from previous contracts. Basically, it was sloppy, and mistakes could easily occur. So, in addition to having relatively little knowledge or experience, and no real supervision of the work I was doing, I was using a system that was inherently risky if one did not pay close attention.
So, yeah, I cut and pasted and copied some clauses and generic, boilerplate Statement of Work statements, but I did not carefully review all the language from the previous contract that I had used as a template; you know, “Save As” and then make changes. Oops. The contract I was preparing was for refurbishing the 20’ and 40’ shipping containers that were accumulating on the base, several thousand of them, and touch up paint and stenciling of unit identification codes and storage and contents codes. I had sent the statement of work to a reputable small contractor working on the base and received a quote of about $14,000. This contractor was a Canadian citizen whose family had immigrated from Afghanistan during the war with the USSR, so he had family and connections, spoke the language, and had a crew of local laborers that could accomplish the task within a few months. Unfortunately, in my Request for Quote (RFQ), I had copied and pasted language in the Statement of Work (SOW) from a past similar contract that addressed only the stenciling and touch-up paint. When I prepared the contract award, I inserted the customer’s updated SOW that described the full list of refurbishment tasks to be performed. Unaware of the mistake, the contractor signed the contract, and then I signed, and the contractor got his crew together and began work.
After a few days, my customer, an Air Force officer, contacted me to complain that the contractor was not following the Statement of Work, and not completing the necessary minor repairs and refurbishments. When I spoke with the contractor, he showed me my RFQ that only mentioned stenciling and touch-up paint. After discussion and his research, he informed me that his quote to do all the work shown in the SOW would be about 10 times as much, or $144,000. My customer was understandably upset, because he thought that he had a signed contract, but learned that the work he wanted done would cost much more. The contractor was upset, because he had signed a contract without re-checking the SOW, and now was afraid he would be forced to work at a substantial loss or suffer a defaulted contract. I was embarrassed by my mistake, felt bad for the contractor and his Afghan employees, and felt worse that I had let down my customer.
Luckily, because the contract was simply a Microsoft Word document, and even $100,000 is considered a rounding error in a military operation that costs billions of dollars per day, I was able to easily fix it. I contacted the Resource Manager (financial officer) and explained my mistake, and he provided me the additional funds. I tore up the faulty contract, prepared a new, accurate one, and signed it with the contractor, and his crew got to work on the new tasks. I learned a valuable lesson about attention to detail and proofing all documents that were involved in the contract file.
And the overall scenario highlights the nature of the ‘win-win’ arrangement that COs are charged to attain, because technically the contractor signed a contract and was obligated to perform. But it was my mistake that led to the situation, and he would not have signed the contract had he known of the discrepancy. So, by cancelling the faulty contract and awarding a new one, the customer still got what he needed, the contractor got a fair price for his work, and both sides were able to do business again in the future.