Acquisition Tips & Tools #61: Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) Refresher

Issue Date: November 1, 2018

This month’s tips and tools is a reminder of the importance of timely and thorough CPARS evaluations.
Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could know how a vendor performed on previous requirements prior to making an award decision?  As you probably know, you can!  The Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) allows acquisition professionals to view past performance evaluations of offerors before making awards.  This ensures the Government receives the best possible quality of performance.

The information in PPIRS is only as good as the information each Assessing Official’s Representative (AOR) and Assessing Official (AO) provides in each Contractor Performance Assessment Rating (CPAR).  This means that we are all responsible for providing accurate, thorough, and prompt past performance information to the system so other agencies can use it to make informed decisions. With PPIRS and CPARS merging into one system for login purposes, all users who have not logged in since July 15, 2018 will need to reset their usernames and passwords.

Once you are logged in, if you are not sure where to start, you can run a status report in CPARS.  This will tell you which contracts have been assigned to you, and whether an assessment is due, overdue, or completed.  If an evaluation shows as “initiated,” it means you have started the evaluation but have not sent it to the AO.  If you are the Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR) on a contract and you do not see that contract listed on your status report, please contact your Contracting Officer to get the contract assigned to you in the system or to determine whether another AOR has been assigned. You also have access to a to-do list where the system may initiate evaluations for you based on the contract dates in the system.

Please note that a CPAR is only required for contracts with total values over the Simplified Acquisition Threshold.  For contracts awarded prior to July 1, 2018, that threshold is $150,000; for new contracts awarded after that date, the threshold is $250,000.
As a reminder, the CPARS workflow is shown below, with the AOR role in bold:

Step 1 – Contract Registration

Step 2 – AOR initiates a CPAR evaluation and enters ratings and narratives, submits to AO.

Step 3 – AO validates the AOR’s narratives and ratings, signs and sends to contractor representative.

Step 4 – Contractor Representative provides comments and concurs or non-concurs.

Step 5 – AO reviews contractor comments, modifies (if needed) and either closes the CPAR (if the Contractor Representative concurred with the AO’s assessment) or forwards it to Reviewing Official.

Step 6 –  If the Contractor Representative did not concur with the AO’s assessment, the Reviewing Official provides comments and closes.

Step 7 – The CPAR becomes available in PPIRS for Government-wide use.

This process repeats each year for most contracts, and can be done more often if a past performance issue comes up, a COR with intimate knowledge of the contractor’s performance leaves,  or if the Period of Performance (PoP) ends sooner (e.g. termination or less than 12-month option periods.)  Each assessment should be based on the most recent performance period; these reports are not cumulative.
Finally, timeliness is a priority.  CPAR evaluations must be completed within 120 days following the end of the period you are assessing.  This includes 60 days for the contractor representative to review and respond.  That means that the AOR and the AO portions of the workflow must be completed in 60 days or less. We would like to ask for your assistance in improving our compliance on this item. This can be done by ensuring evaluations are initiated, filled in, and sent to the Assessing Officer promptly following the end of a performance period.