U.S. Office Of Personnel Management, 1900 E Street, NW., Room 1342, Washington, DC 20415

B -- STUDY OF EXPENSES UNIQUE TO GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS SOL NA DUE 071197 POC Ray Hesson, 202-606-1045 WEB: OPM Procurement Web Page, http://www.opm.gov/procure. E-MAIL: email, rdhesson@opm.gov. This is a Request for Information (RFI) only. No formal solicitation will be issued as a result of this announcement. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) intends to evaluate responses to this synopsis before finalizing work statements and making final decisions concerning the overall acquisition strategy. The ultimate objective is to acquire a study of the costs unique to Government operations. The study seeks to improve OPM's ability to evaluate the results of Federal labor-management partnerships by developing a method to identify and quantify, at least in gross aggregate measures, costs required to provide the public services or social benefits required of labor-management partnerships operating in the Federal sector. Identifying the full spectrum of costs incurred and the benefits or services required to be produced will permit more intelligent assessment, evaluation, and benchmarking of the results of partnership. The performance benchmarks contemplated by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (the Results Act) need "real" cost information. We can make intelligent decisions about the performance, and results of government activities only if we can identify and disaggregate the full spectrum of costs incurred and services required. Background The Results Act requires that governmental activities set goals for performance and measure results of federal programs in terms of service to customers and citizens. Consistent with the intentions of the Results Act, in October 1993 the Administration launched a government-wide initiative to refocus labor-management relations from litigation to improving service, performance, and results. Leadership of this initiative was assigned to the National Partnership Council (the Council), a Government-wide body charged with advising the President on labor-management issues in the executive branch and comprising senior agency and labor officials. The Director of OPM serves as Chair of the Council, and OPM manages the work of the Council. To support implementation of the Results Act, the Council's 1997 Strategic Action Plan focuses on encouraging federal labor-management partnerships to address cost savings and increased productivity achieved as a results of partnership, and to provide partnerships with information on how to evaluate or measure their results and outcomes. Issues in Evaluating Federal Partnerships Evaluating and measuring the cost savings and increases in productivity from federal labor-management partnerships poses special challenges. Ideally, benefit-cost and cost-effectiveness measures would be developed for services provided by labor-management partnerships operating within the framework of the federal government. Changes in these measures would permit assessment of changes in performance. Using these measures to compare services performed by federal labor-management partnerships with equivalent services performed under non-federal ownership and management would provide benchmarks. Direct evaluation of federal partnerships by traditional benefit-cost or cost-effectiveness measures does not account for the full spectrum of benefits provided or costs incurred by a labor-management partnership operating as part of the Federal government. A Federal labor-management partnership functioning within a public organization provides two types of services. First is direct service or benefit to its customers, clients, or beneficiaries. Second are public services or social benefits that the Federal partnership is required to provide. This second category of services or benefits share several characteristics: First, they are usually prescribed externally by statute, regulation, or directive, and reflect legislative decisions. Second, they are intended to benefit persons or groups other than the customers of beneficiaries of the partnership's direct services. Third, they often set standard of performance for the service, prescribe the means by which the service must be provided, or specify the requirements governing the service. Fourth, theyattempt to achieve such goals as equity, protection of public values, or broader distribution of economic opportunity. Providing these public services and social benefits usually requires that the Federal partnership bear extra costs that a non-Federal entity providing equivalent services does not bear. These include, by way of example and not of enumeration: Rent. Federal agencies must occupy specified properties in prescribed locations at prescribed rents. The prescribed locations help support the economies of central cities, and the prescribed rents include a substantial overhead charges that, among others things, finances construction of buildings for the rest of government Federal agencies are not free to move locations or to negotiate rents to lower their costs. Personnel. Federal agencies incur extra costs to inform all citizens of job openings, to operate objective merit-based personnel systems, to follow special hiring and layoff procedures to ensure just treatment of our nation's veterans,and to provide adjudicatory mechanisms to redress improper personnel practices. Benefits. The Federal government has undertaken obligations that reflect policy determinations about equitable treatment of its workforce, such as health benefits to ensure proper medical care, a financial stability and security for retirement. Procurement. Policies and processes are designed to ensure opportunities open and accessible to a wide range of suppliers and to distribute economic opportunities to certain categories of businesses. Limitations on capital budgeting to keep expenditures on a pay-as-you-go basis limit the ability to reduce long-term costs by financing. Companies interested in performing this work should submit information demonstrating their company's ability to perform the work. References of private and Federal sector clients should also be provided. We are interested in "ballpark" cost estimates for various levels of effort (high, medium, low). OPM will not pay for information provided in response to this synopsis. The solicitation for this effort, to be synopsized at a later date, is expected to be a Request for Quotations (RFQ) utilizing Simplified Acquisition Procedures. We hope to award a contract for this study in September 1997 with the results of the study being due approximately 2 months later. Those who wish to respond to this request for information should address their response to Ray Hesson, at the Office of Personnel Management, Room 1342, 1900 E Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20415. Responses, to be considered, must be received no later than 3:30 pm on July 11, 1997. Replies may be faxed to 202-606-1464 or sent via E-mail to RDHesson@opm.com. (0175)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0012 19970626\B-0002.SOL)