Changes in the DOI Contracting Officer Warrant Program Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 09:27:56 -0500 X-Mailer: Z-Mail 4.0 (4.0.0 Aug 21 1995) To: "AO - All Administrative Officers", "B - Branch Chiefs and Offices", "DC - All District Chiefs", "A - Division Chief and Staff" Subject: Changes in the DOI Contracting Officer Warrant Program Cc: "Alice A Sabatini, Administrative Officer, Reston, VA" , "Judy L Claussen, Specifications Writer, Reston, VA" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii The Department of Interior has recently approved changes in their warrant program that could have a dramatic affect on the way we do business in the field in WRD. The most significant change from a monetary standpoint is a recurring training requirement (every 2 years) for all individuals with warrants. For WRD, we estimate that this training requirement will cost the division about $80,000 per year if we continue with the present number of existing warrants. Many offices will find this training requirement difficult to meet when coupled with other mandatory training requirements in the district in the same year. The Senior Administrative Officers of WRD are meeting this week in Denver, Colorado with the other Senior Administrative Officers of the bureau to investigate methods to improve, streamline and make more our procurement delivery system more customer friendly and cost effective. Next week, the WRD Senior AOs will meet together to discuss the outcome of that meeting and to determine a strategy for meeting this procurement training requirement within WRD. The new version of the Contracting Officer Warrant System manual has not been distributed to field offices yet. At present, the Office of Procurement and Contracts is unable to issue warrants under the new manual until new required workload reviews are performed. The USGS has submitted this data, but has no date when the Department review will be completed. In the interim, I have asked that all requests for new warrants be sent through the Division Administrative Officer for review. -- Alice A. Sabatini (aasabati@usgs.gov) Division Administrative Officer Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey 703-648-5027; fax 703-648-5295