The contractors who handle DCAA audits best aren’t the ones who prepare hardest when DCAA calls. They’re the ones who never stopped auditing themselves. I’ve seen it play out in both directions. A contractor with a functioning internal audit program walks into a DCAA business system review with organized workpapers, documented findings, and a corrective…
A proposal isn’t just a sales document. In federal contracting, it’s a legal representation of your costs — and DCAA treats it that way. I’ve watched contractors win contracts and then spend the next twelve months trying to reconcile what they bid against what they’re actually spending. Sometimes the gap is explainable. Sometimes it’s not….
For government contractors, adhering to DCAA compliance is not just a regulatory requirement but a vital component of efficient operations and financial integrity. Implementing a compliant timekeeping system ensures accurate tracking of employee hours, job costing, and cost accounting, all essential for meeting government standards and facilitating seamless audits. Understanding the nuances of DCAA requirements…
Most contractors understand that the government pays them. Fewer understand that how the government pays them determines how DCAA audits them — and those are very different things. I’ve seen small contractors walk into a contract financing arrangement without fully understanding which payment mechanism they agreed to. By the time they realize the difference, they’re…
The single most expensive position a government contractor can leave unfilled isn’t a billable engineer. It’s a compliance officer. I’ve audited firms where the CFO was also the contracts manager, the timekeeping administrator, and the de facto compliance function — all at once. That arrangement works fine until DCAA shows up. Then it falls apart…
If your material accounting system can’t pass scrutiny, neither can your contract. I’ve sat across the table from contractors who genuinely believed their inventory tracking was adequate — right up until the moment a DCAA auditor flagged a $400,000 cost disallowance for unsupported material charges. The system wasn’t fraudulent. It was just incomplete. And in…
Your company submitted a proper invoice on June 15 for completed contract deliverables, but the government didn’t process payment until September 3—79 days later—triggering automatic interest penalties of $8,400 under the Prompt Payment Act that the government paid you without dispute. Six months later during your incurred cost audit, DCAA questioned whether you properly accounted…
Your company awarded a $4.2 million critical path subcontract to a vendor whose financial statements showed strong revenues and growth—but during contract execution, the subcontractor declared bankruptcy, defaulted on deliverables, and left you scrambling to find replacement sources while absorbing $680,000 in reprocurement costs that DCAA questioned as avoidable contractor mismanagement because you failed to…
Your company won a $15 million cost-reimbursement prime contract requiring you to manage $8 million in subcontracts, triggering a mandatory Contractor Purchasing System Review (CPSR). DCMA reviewers discovered you lacked documented purchasing procedures, competitive source selection processes, price reasonableness determinations, or subcontractor risk assessments—resulting in significant deficiency findings that suspended your purchasing system approval and…
Government contractors hear a lot of acronyms, but few matter more to getting paid than PIEE—the Procurement Integrated Enterprise Environment. If you’ve ever submitted an invoice to the Department of Defense, you’ve used PIEE (or its core module, WAWF – Wide Area Workflow). And if you haven’t yet, you soon will. But here’s the part…
