Six Justice Department components kept awarding new contract orders under procurement vehicles that had already run out, according to a watchdog audit released this week — the fourth time since 2022 that DOJ's inspector general has caught contracting officials at the department using expired paperwork to buy goods and services. The finding raises a question that goes beyond bookkeeping: whether contractors won tens of millions of dollars in work that should have been competed instead.
The DOJ Office of the Inspector General built a universe of 5,601 orders awarded across fiscal years 2021 through 2023 that appeared, based on public FPDS-NG contract data, to have been issued after their underlying procurement vehicle's performance period had ended. From that universe, OIG pulled a judgmental sample of 45 orders worth more than $39 million, spread across the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Prison Industries, the Bureau of Prisons, DOJ's litigating divisions and staff offices, and the U.S. Marshals Service. The audit, numbered 26-101 and published September 24, 2026, was designed to answer a narrower question left open by three earlier OIG reports that had flagged the same problem only at the FBI and BOP: is this a department-wide pattern, or two components with a bad habit?
The answer OIG reached was blunt. Of the 45 sampled orders, 37 had some kind of performance-period irregularity. One order was awarded under a contract that had flatly expired. Twelve were issued under Blanket Purchase Agreements that carried no performance-period end date at all — meaning there was no clock to check in the first place. Three were awarded during option years nobody had exercised. And 21 were awarded under parent vehicles whose end dates had been extended without the FAR-required contract clauses that make such extensions valid.
How a $5 Million-Plus FBI Order Slipped Through for 23 Months
The audit's most detailed case study involves an FBI order the report calls Sample Order 3, awarded under a Blanket Purchase Agreement for comprehensive medical services. The BPA's performance period — after a brief 2019 extension — ended on October 10, 2019. The FBI awarded Sample Order 3 under that same BPA on August 31, 2021, roughly 23 months later.
The report traces how it happened. A predecessor contracting official had intended the BPA's first order to carry option years, but never actually wrote them into the contract. That official later filed a corrective-action memorandum in June 2021 acknowledging the error — and then, months afterward, the same official awarded Sample Order 3 under the same already-expired BPA anyway. The FBI told OIG the cause was the contracting official's inexperience with two internal systems: the Unified Financial Management System and its crossover with FPDS-NG, plus the FBI's own process for structuring option-year contracts inside UFMS.
The order should have drawn extra scrutiny regardless. During fiscal year 2021, FBI policy required its Acquisition Review Board to sign off on any procurement action valued at $5 million or more before award. Sample Order 3, including its option year, cleared that threshold — and never went to the board. OIG's report states plainly: "Hence, the FBI did not comply with the FAR or its established process. Had the FBI awarded the order in accordance with its pre-award review process, it may have prevented the contracting official from using the expired BPA."
Why OIG Says This Isn't Just Paperwork
The stakes the audit lays out go past missed deadlines. Federal law generally requires agencies to compete contracts openly, and procurement vehicles are supposed to have defined performance periods precisely so that competitions get refreshed on schedule instead of drifting indefinitely. OIG's report warns that stretching an expired vehicle to cover a new order sidesteps that requirement entirely.
"Awarding new contract actions outside of the appropriate time period does not comply with federal regulations or department-wide policies and raises questions about the integrity of the procurement process — namely, whether longstanding procurement law (i.e., the CICA), which requires full and open competition in most situations, was circumvented through improper contract extensions," the report states, citing the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984.
OIG frames the risk in practical terms too: "Adhering to the performance period of procurement vehicles promotes the integrity of the procurement process by ensuring that laws, regulations, and policies that require the federal government to compete contracts in most situations are not circumvented. Improper contract extensions also needlessly expose DOJ components to risks of contractor non-compliance, service disruptions, and legal disputes."
The Recordkeeping Problem Underneath the Recordkeeping Problem
Beyond the performance-period issues, auditors found that contracting officials failed to update FPDS-NG — the same public database OIG used to build its 5,601-order universe — to reflect modifications affecting performance periods on 44 of the 45 sampled orders. In other words, the government's own public accounting of when these vehicles ran out was itself unreliable in all but one sampled case. Contract files were also missing or incomplete for 8 of the 45 orders, lacking pages, signatures or documentation of modifications; in at least one instance investigators said extensive missing files left them unable to determine whether an order had even been issued under a valid vehicle.
OIG attributed both problems to contracting officials deviating from established requirements for procuring continued services and for maintaining contract files, and noted that officials had not consulted the FPDS-NG User Manual to clarify how to enter the data correctly in the first place.
What It Means for Contractors
For companies holding BPAs, IDIQs and other multi-award vehicles with DOJ components, the audit is a signal that the department's own compliance checks — not just competitors' bid protests — are now a live risk to orders issued near or after a vehicle's nominal end date. Contractors that received orders flagged in this sample, or similar ones outside it, could see those actions revisited as DOJ implements OIG's eight recommendations to the FBI, BOP, FPI and USMS covering pre-award vehicle verification, contract-extension controls, contract-file-maintenance training, and FPDS-NG data-accuracy controls. Firms bidding on DOJ task orders should also expect closer scrutiny of whether the underlying vehicle is genuinely active before an award goes final, since this is now the fourth OIG report since 2022 to find the department's own systems couldn't reliably answer that question. DOJ provided a draft of the report to all six components; written responses from the FBI, BOP, FPI and USMS, the components that received recommendations, are included in the final report, while DEA and OBDs did not respond.
