Footnote 1: The single-purchase limit is the maximum amount a cardholder may charge for any single procurement. The FDIC determines the limits for individual cardholders and provides for purchases in excess of the standard limits. Neither cardholders nor merchants are permitted to split a single purchase into smaller amounts in order to avoid exceeding the single-purchase threshold.
Footnote 2: Spend analysis is a tool that provides management with knowledge about how much is being spent for certain goods and services, who the buyers are, and who the suppliers are. Spend analysis includes automating, extracting, supplementing, organizing, and analyzing procurement data.
Footnote 3: FPI funds training and employment for prisoners in federal penal and correctional institutions through the sale of its products and services to government agencies.
Footnote 4: GAO report number GAO-04-870.
Footnote 5: The Federal Acquisition Council (FAC) estimated the difference between the processing cost of a procurement card purchase and a purchase order at about $66 per transaction for the year 2000.
Footnote 6: We used the 2.9 percent from the Department of Veterans Affairs because it was a percentage of total goods and services procured, and the percentage was the most conservative and most comparable to the FDIC's procurements for administrative goods and services and to our audit objective. For GAO's study, in addition to the 2.9 percent for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the other percentages were: 7 to 54 percent for the Department of Health and Human Services; however, those percentages related only to $100 million in expenditures (not the total universe) for office-related products; and 10 percent for the Department of Agriculture which GAO described as 10 percent less than the Federal Supply Schedule prices for office supplies (not the total universe of administrative goods and services).
Footnote 7: The Procurement Executives Council, a government interagency council consisting of agency procurement executives, was established in 1999 to monitor and improve the Federal Acquisition System. In 2003, the council was renamed the Federal Acquisition Council to provide greater flexibility and a more inclusive reach beyond procurement.
Footnote 8: The FDIC obtains and submits contractor performance information to the Contractor Performance System hosted by the National Institutes of Health.
Footnote 9: During the audit period, the requirement to use FPI as a preferred procurement source was in 18 U.S.C. § 4124.
Footnote 10: The requirement was removed by Division H, Title VI, Sec. 637, of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005, Pub. L. 108-447, signed by the President on December 8, 2004.
Footnote 11: CMIA recorded 791 DOA contracts with payments, or pending payments, since April 30, 2003. We considered these contracts to be active contracts. We also identified 350 DOA contracts in the CMIA with an effective date within our audit period. We considered them as contracts awarded during our audit period.
