The federal government maintainsinformation about federal contractor performance in a system of databases thatis supposed to keep contract officers up to date on how well contractors areexecuting on their work, and whether they have been sanctioned or subject tocriminal penalties.

But Sen. Claire McCaskill says thesystem "feels shockingly old and clunky," with relevant information"scanty, and scattered across multiple databases."

The Missouri Democrat says she wantsmore reliable data standards to identify contracting companies, and a moreunified system, with a simpler interface, that includes data from states, whenavailable. Additionally, she is concerned that contract officers are reluctantto enter negative performance information about contractors.

Government-wide contractor performanceinformation is accessible via the Past Performance Information Retrieval(PPIRS) database, established in 2002 under the E-Government Act.

But there is a separate system, theContractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) for enteringinformation into PPIRS, created in 2010 to combine individual agency systems.Information on suspended and debarred contractors is contained in yet anotherplace, the System for Award Management (SAM). And the Federal AwardeePerformance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS) contains information oncontractors who have been subject to criminal convictions or certain civilpenalties.

Plans have been in place since 2001 tocreate a single system called the Integrated Acquisition Environment to unifyall contracting information from solicitations to awards to performance metricsin a single resource.

Delays, cost overruns and developmentproblems have pushed back the scheduled completion date to 2018, according toKevin Youel Page, a General Services Administration assistant commissioner whotestified at a March 6 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and GovernmentalAffairs Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight, which McCaskillchairs.

"We've suffered our ownmissteps," Page said. "We're using new 21st century architecturalprinciples and the right kind of development approach to minimize risk."

The proposed consolidation is being phasedin gradually. The next step is the inclusion of three systems used to inputpast performance information on contacts into the Contractor PerformanceAssessment Reporting System (CPARS), set to take place in June.

McCaskill is also worried that a unifiedsystem might maintain some of the divergent data standards of legacy databases.

For example, company names frequentlyappear with a variety of different spellings, making it potentially difficultfor contract officers to get a read on a company's full contracting history.Companies can maintain dozens of identifiers in the Dun and Bradstreetnumbering system used by the government, and this makes it difficult to trackthe relationship between divisions, subsidiaries, joint ventures and othercorporate entities. Companies can change their names or be acquired by otherfirms and their performance histories can essentially disappear.

McCaskill noted that CGI Federal, thecompany most closely associated with the buggy HealthCare.gov website launch,was built out of the acquisition of American Management Systems by parentcompany CGI. American Management Systems had its own problems as a governmentcontractor, failing in a project to build an online portal for the federalretirement savings system and modernize its recordkeeping.

McCaskill wondered if this history wouldhave given any contract officers second thoughts about the HealthCare.govassignment. CGI Federal, she noted, was ranked "exceptional" in everycategory in a June 2013 assessment.

"We know it turned out not to betrue," McCaskill said.