Report 2016-125.1 Recommendations

To ensure that the university maximizes the use of competition, the Legislature should revise the Public Contract Code to specify the conditions under which the university may amend contracts without competition.

To ensure that the university maximizes the use of competition, the Legislature should revise the Public Contract Code to narrowly define the professional and personal services that the university may exempt from competitive bidding.

To ensure that university locations adequately justify the necessity of contracts that will displace university employees, the Office of the President should actively enforce compliance with the displacement guidelines by monitoring university locations for compliance, providing regular training on the displacement guidelines to university locations, and amending the displacement guidelines to state that the Office of the President's human resources department has the authority to approve or reject displacement decisions.

To ensure that university locations adequately justify the necessity of contracts that will displace university employees, the Office of the President should revise contracting policies to address situations in which university locations are contemplating entering into services contracts instead of hiring university employees to perform an activity. In these situations, the Office of the President should require university locations to perform an analysis that is similar to the one it requires when current university employees are displaced.

To ensure that university locations adequately justify the necessity of contracts that will displace university employees, the Office of the President should ensure that staff with the necessary business and financial skills at the Office of the President review and approve the cost analyses that university locations submit.

To ensure that university locations adequately justify the necessity of contracts that will displace university employees, the Office of the President should revise the cost analysis requirements in the displacement guidelines to mitigate the risk of university locations incorrectly estimating savings by requiring a threshold level of savings as part of their business and financial necessity analyses and requiring that university locations periodically reevaluate the savings after the services contracts take effect to inform future contracting decisions.

To ensure that the university achieves its goals of obtaining services at the lowest cost or best value and of providing vendors with fair access to contracting opportunities, the Office of the President should direct university locations, including its own local procurement office, to implement controls to ensure staff better comply with the university's contract manual's requirements for using standard terms and conditions, obtaining the proper contract approvals, and awarding of sole-source contracts.

To ensure that the university achieves its goals of obtaining services at the lowest cost or best value and of providing vendors with fair access to contracting opportunities, the Office of the President should revise the university's contract manual to incorporate the best practices found in the State Contracting Manual for limiting the use of amendments to repeatedly extend existing contracts.

To ensure that the university achieves its goals of obtaining services at the lowest cost or best value and of providing vendors with fair access to contracting opportunities, the Office of the President should revise the university's contract manual to narrow the exemption from competition to only selected professional services, similar to the State Contracting Manual.

To ensure that the university achieves its goals of obtaining services at the lowest cost or best value and of providing vendors with fair access to contracting opportunities, the Office of the President should direct all university locations to implement controls in their online procurement systems to prevent staff from avoiding the requirement to competitively bid a contract when individual purchases of the same good or service accumulate to $100,000 or more within a fiscal year.

To help ensure that the university will implement its central contract database for tracking and monitoring all university contracts in a timely manner, the Office of the President should develop a detailed project implementation plan by October 2017 that outlines a schedule of the specific activities that will need to occur to complete this effort.

To maximize benefits from the systemwide procurement initiative and to ensure that the university uses those benefits for its teaching, research, and public service missions, the Office of the President should direct all university locations to provide better documentation to substantiate actual benefits they claim related to their procurement decisions.

To maximize benefits from the systemwide procurement initiative and to ensure that the university uses those benefits for its teaching, research, and public service missions, the Office of the President should revise its guidance to ensure the benefits that university locations claim result from only procurement-related activities.

To maximize benefits from the systemwide procurement initiative and to ensure that the university uses those benefits for its teaching, research, and public service missions, the Office of the President should implement a process to centrally direct these benefits to ensure that university locations use them to support the university's core missions.

To maximize benefits from the systemwide procurement initiative and to ensure that the university uses those benefits for its teaching, research, and public service missions, the Office of the President should study ways to measure actual procurement benefits—possibly focusing this effort on benefits from larger dollar amounts—and if such measurement is not possible, it should clearly disclose to the regents and the public that the amounts it reports are based on estimates.

To maximize benefits from the systemwide procurement initiative and to ensure that the university uses those benefits for its teaching, research, and public service missions, the Office of the President should, if actual benefits are measurable, implement a process to monitor and report annually to the regents the estimated and actual benefits.