Overseas Contingency Operations Contracts After Iraq: Enabling Financial Management Research and Transparency Through Contract Labeling

Abstract

The challenges posed by both manmade and natural crises require flexible and rapid responses from policy-makers. However, the inherent uncertainty of these situations makes them vulnerable to waste, fraud, and abuse. Consequently, contracts awarded during crises would often be deemed unsuitable during ordinary times. The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (Recovery Act) efforts after the most recent financial crisis, and the government’s responses to natural disasters since this century began have all involved high-profile incidents of crisis contracting. Governmental efforts to improve transparency and oversight regarding these contract awards have been admirable, but they are limited in their ability to maintain and proliferate lessons learned. This project addresses that problem by creating a crisis-funded contract dataset to test best practices across different domains and enhance data transparency for future practitioners and researchers.