GSA spent $100M but couldn't track studies
An inspector‑general audit found GSA spent $100 million on building studies without a reliable way to track them, while the agency is also moving to implement transactional data reporting across schedule contracts this summer. The twin findings underline a common failure mode: buying work without an inventory or ownership model turns investments into waste and leaves teams rediscovering what they already bought. That reinforces the idea that documentation systems must answer 'what do we have, who owns it, and is it current?' not just serve as archives. (federalnewsnetwork.com) (federalnewsnetwork.com)
The federal government’s main landlord spent more than $133 million on building studies over five years, and an inspector general found it did not have a reliable system to know what studies it already had, who owned them, or whether they were still useful. The audit said the Public Buildings Service could not effectively track and monitor the studies it was buying. (oversight.gov) The Public Buildings Service is the General Services Administration unit that manages thousands of federal buildings and leases, from courthouses to office space. Federal News Network reported the inspector general focused on studies used to make decisions about repairs, renovations, and long-term building plans. (federalnewsnetwork.com) Auditors looked at a five-year period ending September 30, 2024, and found the Office of Portfolio Management alone had obligated more than $133 million for building studies. They also found the agency lacked a centralized inventory that could show whether a study had already been done for the same building or problem. (oversight.gov) That creates a very basic failure: one team can pay for a study without knowing another team already bought a similar one. The inspector general said that weak tracking increased the risk of duplicate work and made it harder to use old studies to guide new decisions. (oversight.gov) The audit did not say every dollar was wasted, but it did say the system around the spending was too loose to prove the studies were consistently helping building management at the best value for taxpayers. The recommendation was to create stronger controls for collecting, storing, and monitoring study information. (oversight.gov) At almost the same time, the General Services Administration is pushing a very different data project on the buying side of government. It is rolling out Transactional Data Reporting across all Multiple Award Schedule contract categories, which means contractors will have to send the agency detailed data on what they sold and at what price. (gsa.gov) Multiple Award Schedule contracts are the giant catalog contracts agencies use to buy everything from software to office services. Transactional Data Reporting is supposed to give the government a clearer picture of actual purchase prices instead of relying only on older pricing disclosures and negotiations. (gsa.gov) Federal News Network reported the rollout has been a nearly decade-long effort, and the agency now expects the reporting requirement to cover all schedule special item numbers this summer. A General Services Administration update says the requirement becomes mandatory for all Multiple Award Schedule special item numbers with Refresh 31. (federalnewsnetwork.com) (gsa.gov) Put those two stories together and the contrast is hard to miss. The agency is demanding line-by-line sales data from vendors while an inspector general says its own building arm did not keep a dependable inventory of studies it had already purchased. (federalnewsnetwork.com) (oversight.gov) This is less a story about one bad database than about ownership. If a report worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars lands in a shared drive without a current owner, a date, and a clear tag for the building it covers, the next employee often has to start over and buy the answer again. (oversight.gov) That problem gets more expensive inside a property portfolio that is already under strain. Federal News Network reported last month that the General Services Administration faces a maintenance and repair backlog of about $50 billion across its owned buildings, which means every planning dollar has to do real work. (federalnewsnetwork.com) The inspector general’s audit lands as the agency is trying to become more data-driven in procurement, and it shows the harder part is often not collecting more information but keeping a usable inventory of what you already paid for. In government, a study that cannot be found is uncomfortably close to a study that never existed. (oversight.gov)
