Information Technology's Use of Contractors

The OIG audited Information Technology's (IT) use of non-craft staff augmentation (SA) contractor employees working in IT positions during February 2016 for which TVA paid about $1.8 million in labor costs and associated labor markups. Overall, we found the majority of the 207 SA contractor employees had straight-time hourly pay rates less than or equal to TVA midpoint hourly pay rates and the rates were comparable to TVA employee pay rates for the corresponding job codes. However, we also found (1) TVA management's approval of SA contractor employee compensation exceeding the midpoint rate did not take into account the contractor's indirect cost markup rates applied to the pay rate, (2) IT does not currently have a policy in place requiring knowledge transfer from contractor to TVA employees, (3) manual data entry is required to update minimum and midpoint pay rates from TVA human resource information system, People Lifecycle Unified System (PLUS), into TVA's contractor system, IQNavigator (IQN), and (4) IQN compares a contractor employee's hourly rate change (e.g., pay increase) to the midpoint rate in effect for the job code when the assignment was made, rather than to the current midpoint rate unless a new assignment is created.