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Alaska Native Corporations' Contracts

An investigation into how Alaska Native corporations are landing billions in federal contracts found the companies have seen dramatic growth over the past eight years and said the contracting has totaled nearly $24 billion during that period.

The Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, headed by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., released some of its early findings Tuesday, in advance of a July 16 hearing she plans to hold on Native contracting. From 2000 to 2008, only one-fifth of all contracts awarded to Alaska Native corporations were performed in Alaska, McCaskill's committee found.

It also found that last year Alaska Native corporations received 19 percent of all federal contracts awarded to small businesses.

Special contracting rules for Native co rporations have allowed them to "qualify for large contracts while circumventing the normal competition process," McCaskill's office wrote in its report. About 70 percent of those contracts were awarded through the Department of Defense, which gave Native corporations contracts for security and maintenance at military bases, among other services.

Read the whole story here.

 

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It sounds to me as if Alaska Native co may be enjoying the rules of smaller businesses, when the subcontracts they've landed, and that they've given out would qualify them as a large corporation. I believe this is a State issue even though they are talking about government contracts?

I'm not sure.

In general I think the process is corrupt. Is this a case of awarding no-bid contracts? I hear about it all the time, an example would be Haliburton. The problem is when people in the business world go into politics, and award their buddies. There are too many holes where the conflict of interest laws are concerned. I would not be surprised if this were the case here.

I'm against no-bid contracts, but I'm also against government automatically awarding the lowest bidder. I don't believe it's an over-simplification to say that people in government need to recruse themselves in decisions involving their attachments in the business world, and when they do not, they need to be removed.

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