Will Fed Contractors Say "Thank You" for Faster Pay?

Written by David Frum on Friday September 9, 2011

How big a deal is the President's promise to expedite federal payments? Just listen to this (small scale) federal contractor:

How extraordinary that this subject should come up at this very time; payment was just made today via electronic deposit for a contract I bid on and was issued on 07/14; shipped on 07/29, and delivered to the federal customer two days later.

I invoiced them via email & fax the next day. They sat on my invoice and finally kicked it back 08/12 because nowadays DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting System) has this wonderfully inefficient and incredibly complicated electronic processing system known as Wide Area Work Flow that all invoicing MUST go through - of course signing up and registering and learning how to submit and getting it all done nice and proper ate up the better part of three NON-PRODUCTIVE days.

Considering that the price of my services is about $500 a day, not counting the weeks of delay in getting paid, the invoicing process alone cost me up to about $1500 in lost time.

So: will this proposal win over the contractor? The rest of the email says something about the resistance the president will encounter:

Now a guy who's never performed a days worth of productive labor in his entire life, who never won an award in sports or academia or achieved anything notable that we're aware of (that Harvard Law Review doesn't count- they bent their own rules when they handed that to him as an unpublished student), who's sum total of personal achievement are two books about his worthless thoughts and dreams, who can't even give a speech to a room full of second graders without a teleprompter - THIS guy who's never had an original thought in his entire life, who's done nothing but sit on committees and make the simple complex - is going to simplify and streamline a government process?