Investigating Possible Locations of Undisclosed Subcontractors through Data Analytics of Employment and Federal Contract Records

Abstract

This paper analyzes data from employment and federal contracts, and it provides a characterization of how contracts affect local employment. It is a continuation of the research presented at last year's Acquisition Research Symposium on searching for undisclosed subcontractors by exploiting the linkages between publicly available employment data and cuts to federal contracts. Many federal and DoD contracts are performed by a team of contracting entities, where some prime contractors rely on subcontractors to execute specific parts of the contract. For many reasons, including national security, privacy, or competitive advantage, some of these subcontractors are not publicly disclosed and have the potential to be unmitigated single stress points in the acquisition process. The paper focuses on gaining a deeper and data-verified understanding of the interactions between federal awards and employment numbers, particularly on the boost to local employment that the start of a large contract may provide. A process for analyzing large federal contracts side by side with employment information is presented. The result of the analysis has found that locations of large Navy awards rank above 70% of other locations in the country in terms of the magnitude of employment changes, under certain industry classification reporting methods.