Summary

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information about the Department of Energy's (DOE) fiscal years 1987 and 1988 award fees to contractors at six facilities, focusing on the extent to which DOE considered environmental, safety, and health (ES&H) matters in evaluating contractors' performance and determining award fees.

GAO found that DOE: (1) rated the overall performance of five of the six contractors as very good or excellent, and the remaining contractor as marginal to satisfactory; (2) paid award fees ranging from $1.4 million to nearly $10 million to all six contractors, accounting for 46.5 percent to 89.0 percent of the total available award fees; (3) generally rated all contractors as satisfactory to excellent in regard to their ES&H performance, although it rated one contractor as marginal during one evaluation period; (4) assigned weights ranging from 0 percent to 50 percent to ES&H performance in the overall scoring process; and (5) did not consistently consider ES&H performance as a distinct performance factor.