Mr. Chairman, moving from that, the issue of sole source contracting keeps coming up. Certainly the auditor general commented on that.
Under the current rules, sole sourcing is an exception to the competition process. It is acceptable, under government contract regulations, when there is a pressing emergency, when the contract is valued at less than $25,000, when it is not in the public interest to solicit bids or when only one person or firm is capable of doing the work.
When public works wants to sole source, it has to do an advance contract award notice. I believe it is called an ACAN. An ACAN is used to publicly advertise the government's intention to award a sole source contract. Given that it is only acceptable in emergencies or when the contract is $25,000 or less, in 1997 contracts over $25,000 totalled $3.9 billion and $1.34 billion of that was sole sourced. Clearly, more than 25% was sole sourced.
How does the department justify that? Is that still the current situation? Is there as much sole sourcing now as those rather dated statistics?
While I am at it, I have more specific questions. Of those, an examination was done in 1999 by the auditor general. Of a sample of 50 sole sourced contracts that were examined, 25% were neither adequately justified or linked to program objectives, 95% did not include an analysis of alternatives that were adequate to support the decision to contract and in 46% of the cases the statement of work and requirements, the expected performance and the outcome, the level of effort, the value and the costs were completely unclear. They were incomprehensible in fact.
It is a long question regarding the issue of sole sourcing. What is the current status? How much of the overall spending is sole sourced? Do we continue to be plagued by the problems that the auditor general identified in that practice?