Gian Luigi Albano of Italy’s centralized purchasing agency, CONSIP, joined Keith McCook (a senior procurement attorney in South Carolina government) and GW Law’s Christopher Yukins on November 10, 2023 to discuss the law-and-economics of framework agreements (which in the U.S. system are known as “indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity” contracts).
They spoke at the 10th anniversary meeting of the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) Law Institutein New Orleans. The Law Institute is a regular gathering of chief procurement officers (CPOs) and state public procurement attorneys from around the United States.
On November 14-15, 2023, GW Law’s Professor Christopher Yukins joined the International Conference on Public Procurement and Innovation in Africa (livestream available), coordinated by Professor Geo Quinot (Stellenbosch University) and held through the National Research Foundation in Pretoria, South Africa. A focus of the conference was South Africa’s pending legislation on public procurement. Chris Yukins spoke on the U.S. government’s use of procurement as an engine for innovation through the Small Business Innovation Research program, which is administered through a policy directive from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). Each year, SBA notes, U.S. federal agencies with “research and development (R&D) budgets that exceed $100 million are required to allocate 3.2% . . . of this extramural R&D budget to fund small businesses through the SBIR program.” The U.S. SBIR program funds on average 4,000 projects for a total of roughly US$4 billion annually. The SBIR program, which has been extensively studied, was an inspiration for the European Union’s “Innovation Partnerships” strategy under the EU Procurement Directives, and for the United Kingdom’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) (see 2017 study; 2022 study).
The Pretoria conference is just one of several collaborations between GW Law and Stellenbosch University. GW Law’s Dean Jessica Tillipman is co-editing a book on anti-corruption with Stellenbosch’s Professor Sope Williams, and Allison Anthony, deputy director of the African Procurement Law Unit at Stellenbosch and senior lecturer at the University of South Africa, has joined GW Law as a visiting scholar and LLM candidate.
Songezo Mabece, an experienced attorney and public servant whose c.v. includes stints at both Stellenbosch University and GW Law School, helped moderate the conference and continues his good work in South Africa; including as a radio broadcaster.
Congress directed that a report prepared for Stevens Institute of Technology’s Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC) by principal investigators David Drabkin and Christopher Yukins be extended to provide training on potential exclusion and debarment of contractors that have violated U.S. labor laws. The training was done through a two-session webinar series coordinated by the Defense Acquisition University (DAU).
As DAU noted in launching the training, the Department of Labor has thousands of records on violations by federal contractors. The purpose of the training was to explain how to access and assess those records when evaluating contractors, including when assessing their present responsibility.
Expert roundtable on accessing and considering labor law violations, including senior officials from the Labor Department, debarment experts and senior contracting personnel.
On June 7, 2023, GW Law School’s Prof. Christopher Yukins will address a Brussels conference, organized through Utrecht University, “Challenges for Public Procurement in Europe and Beyond: Concept Programme.” He will address the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), which will impose heavy disclosure requirements on vendors from abroad — including vendors from the United States — competing for EU Member State public procurements. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has recommended that members of the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) be exempted from the FSR; Professor Yukins discusses that proposed exemption in his brief presentation (click here for slides).
For background materials and a prior webinar on the FSR, click here
David Drabkin (Procurement Round Table) and Christopher Yukins (George Washington University Law School) discuss two reports done for the Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC), on U.S Defense Department bid protests (bid challenges) and mandatory debarment (exclusion). This presentation was prepared for the annual Swedish public procurement conference (“Upphandlingskonferensen“) in Stockholm, May 4-5, 2023, hosted by Prof Andrea Sundstrand of Stockholm University.
