ABSTRACT
Socioeconomic contracting refers to the government’s efforts to address social ills through the award of contracts to targeted companies such as small disadvantaged (primarily minority-owned), woman-owned, veteran-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned, and small businesses and businesses located in areas of chronic unemployment. Socioeconomic contracting anomalies, such as those discovered during the review of protests sustained by the GAO and summarized in Table 5.2, represent commonplace errant performances by government contracting offices. Practices, such as those discovered and reported by GAO while rendering decisions to sustain protests, however, do not include the infamous socioeconomic contracting practices included in the heinous environs that are the subject of this chapter. Anomalous practices by the GAO; such as failure to establish mandatory set-asides, erroneous findings that targeted companies are not responsible or otherwise improperly excluded from consideration, award of contracts to companies ineligible for designated set-asides, and failure to apply mandatory price preferences; frequently lead to protests from aggrieved contractors. Although these aberrant acts may be committed through the motivation to award contracts to favored contractors, they are not representative of the truly blatant, infamous practices abhorred by true government contract management professionals and the public at large. A discussion of and recommendations for dealing with more scandalous cases are advanced in this chapter.
