When we provide you a draft solicitation for your review and consideration, we include many proposed contract clauses from the compendium. These clauses relate to many issues that we believe may be involved in your solicitation. However, we are not risk analysts and your agency is best positioned to determine its risk tolerance level. The Compendium was drafted to provide commonly-used clauses covering a wide variety of acquisitions. Given the generality of many clauses and the specificity of others, any given clause may or may not be appropriate for your solicitation. While all of them involve some degree of risk allocation, the standard language has not been tailored to address your specific risk needs and may not address all the risks peculiar to your agency or any one proposed acquisition. To illustrate, some clauses may address information about security and privacy issues, but they impose only minimal obligations on your contractor. Consistent with its internal agency policies governing information security, each agency must determine for itself whether the services acquired from the contractor warrant the contractual imposition of additional security controls or privacy-related requirements. To illustrate further, clauses we include may prescribe various insurance requirements – including minimum limits of coverage. The types of coverage and the default policy limits may be excessive or wholly inadequate for your particular needs or circumstance. In the former case, you may add unnecessary cost to your acquisition; in the latter, you may face exposure for claims beyond the scope of coverage or in excess of the required policy limits.
As with all aspects of the solicitation, we recommend you review the proposed clauses provided in a draft solicitation, consult with any related guidance published in the Compendium, and determine whether your agency’s needs, risk tolerance levels, obligations, and allocation of performance and other risks imposed by a draft solicitation are acceptable to your agency in the context of your specific procurement and your agency’s needs.
