“With just a few working days left on the congressional calendar, the fiscal year is likely to end with a continuing resolution. So now is the time for contractors and agencies alike to start preparing for it. Executive Vice President for Policy at the Professional Services Council, Stephanie Kostro, spoke to Federal Drive with Tom Temin for some advice…”
“Tom Temin: Let’s start with the idea of the CR – so much going on in the world, but a continuing resolution is striking close to home. All right, what should contractors do at this point?
Stephanie Kostro: So I think the only silver lining in this whole situation regarding the fiscal year coming to an end without any full year appropriations in sight, is that we’ve been to this rodeo before. We’ve seen what happens what when we get to the end of the fiscal year without a full year appropriation. Hopefully, congressional staffs are working on a continuing resolution. The one issue that I often have with situations like these is that contracting officers and the agencies themselves often don’t want to talk about what goes into a CR, don’t want to think about what happens if you don’t get a CR and that is a shutdown. We’ve experienced several of those over the last 10 years. And our advice from the Professional Services Council is to advise our member companies: Go ahead and prepare for a shutdown. There’s a checklist that we have on our website for our members. It includes things like reaching out to the contracting officer representatives and the contracting officers, seeing what it is that they can do in terms of timelines for deliverables, timelines for invoicing, what happens in a shutdown. The problem that we face is that a lot of our companies are dealing with CORs and KOs as we call them, or contracting officer representatives and contracting officers, who don’t want to admit that a shutdown may be in the offing. And so that is where we run into some hiccups. But we are advising folks to plan for a CR, plan for the possibility, although low, of a shutdown, because the consequences of the shutdown are high…” Read the full interview here.
Source: Now is the time for federal contractors to prepare for a continuing resolution – By Tom Temin, September 8, 2021. Federal News Network.
