Annual compliance report 2020
This report presents the SSRO’s review of compliance by defence contractors with reporting requirements under the regulatory framework for single source defence contracts and associated findings.
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The regulatory framework for single source defence contracts is established by Part 2 of the Defence Reform Act 2014 and the Single Source Contract Regulations 2014 and requires contractors to submit a range of statutory reports to the MOD and the SSRO.
The report examines the timeliness and quality of reports submitted to the SSRO’s Defence Contract Analysis and Reporting System (DefCARS) for qualifying defence contracts and qualifying sub-contracts entered into between 1 April 2015 and 31 March 2020. We have considered reviews carried out by the MOD of submitted reports, in addition to the SSRO’s own reviews, and feedback from the MOD and contractors. The report presents the key resulting messages and actions taken to address issues, and recommends further action to improve timeliness and quality.
During the period covered by the report, we worked to introduce further automatic validation in DefCARS, enabling contractors to address more issues identified automatically by the system before making a report submission. In addition, we carried out targeted reviews of six initial report submissions, which provided insight into how the regulatory framework and the MOD’s internal procedures were being applied. We have summarised recommendations made to the MOD from this process in the compliance report.
Since the last compliance report was published, we undertook a formal review of our compliance methodology and this was published on 31 January 2020, with implementation from 1 April 2020. This compliance report is the last report that will be based on the 2017 compliance methodology.