Senators press OFPP on delayed FAR conflict rule
Disclosure duties are coming, but contractors still do not know what interests must be reported or when the clock starts.
TL;DR
Sens. Gary Peters, Chuck Grassley, Joni Ernst and Maggie Hassan asked Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Kevin Rhodes for a timeline to update the Federal Acquisition Regulation under Public Law 117-324. The FAR Council has drafted a proposed rule, FedScoop reports, but the Preventing Organizational Conflicts of Interest in Federal Acquisition Act’s June 2024 deadline is nearly two years gone. Primes, contractors and CMMC Third Party Assessment Organizations are left waiting on the actual disclosure categories.
FedScoop reports that four senators are pushing the Office of Federal Procurement Policy for a timeline on a Federal Acquisition Regulation update that Congress ordered in December 2022. The Preventing Organizational Conflicts of Interest in Federal Acquisition Act gave the FAR Council 18 months to strengthen governmentwide standards for identifying and mitigating organizational conflicts of interest. That put the deadline in June 2024. The Council has drafted a proposed rule, according to the senators’ letter, but the rulemaking remains incomplete.
The substance matters more than the missed-date box score. The law is aimed at contractors whose outside business interests may conflict with work performed for the government. Grassley framed the bill in 2022 as a transparency measure requiring contractors to disclose other business relationships that conflict with specific federal work, including new potential business that opposes ongoing government services. The current FAR already addresses personal conflicts for contractor employees performing acquisition functions, but the pending law is about organizational conflicts across the contractor’s business, a harder question and a bigger disclosure problem.
This is also becoming a pattern in procurement modernization. The outline here looks familiar: Congress directs a FAR change, the implementing rule reaches the drafted-but-not-final stage, and contractors are told to wait for the actual compliance obligation. The Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative remediation rule is another delayed FAR rulemaking in the same lane. Different policy problem, same operating condition for industry: no final text, no final dates, no reliable field list for the systems and counsel who will have to collect the data.
For primes, subcontractors and CMMC Third Party Assessment Organizations, the practical gap is narrow and annoying. They can identify the business relationships that would obviously raise organizational conflict questions, but they still do not know what disclosure fields the FAR rule will require, how agencies will evaluate them before award, or when interagency review will produce a proposed rule for public comment. That is the work the senators are trying to force into daylight.
Published ·Deep Fathom