Impact of Federal Acquisition Regulation Change on Misconduct

The Project on Government Oversight listed 632 reported acts of government contractor misconduct that resulted in settlements or fines totaling $41.95 billion in the government contracting industry since 2007. Government contracting officials changed the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) in 2009 to reduce acts of misconduct. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to discover if the change to the FAR in 2009 significantly reduced the rate of reported contractor misconduct and to investigate the impact of the change on government contractor ethics business processes. Deterrence theory guided this study of how the change to the FAR in 2009 impacted the rate of reported government contractor misconduct (dependent variable) and government contractor ethics business processes (dependent variable). Data were collected over a 7-year time (independent variable) period, which was divided into 2 separate 3-year time periods, before and after the change to the FAR.