Without being pedantic about it, I use the terms with a nuanced difference detected in the common parlance: acquisition is purchasing something without the trappings beyond mere contract law, but procurement is a formalized process, typically infused with a regime of accountability, transparency, due process, financial controls, and other trappings associated with bureaucratic, if not necessarily governmental, purchasing. My use of the two terms here is more of the common connotations, not the technical.)
Government can acquire its needed construction services or it can procure them. This is an example of how a government simply acquires them:
Auditors Find Rampant Problems In Highway Construction Inspections
This report is a follow-up to a July audit that detailed potentially criminal, ethical and contracting violations in the [Maryland] State Highway Administration's Office of Construction.
auditors uncovered a contracting system that had few rules of its own and skirted existing law.
Contractors often used creative accounting to transfer unspent funds between different projects. Meanwhile, the construction inspection office did not maintain any documentation of what contractors were supposed to do, and had no standard method of estimating how much different projects should cost.
Contracts were often extended and modified without the required step of getting Board of Public Works approval, and new contracts were often awarded when there were still contractors doing work.
Maryland is broken up into several regions by the State Highway Administration, and construction services inspection contracts are given to people and agencies who will do inspections in a region for a fixed amount of time. State procurement law states that money can only be spent on the contract for which it was approved.
Auditors found that contractor were often involved in performing inspections in several areas, and tended to move the money they received between areas to cover for funds that ran out. For 10 contracts auditors looked at, nearly a fourth of all funds - about $11 million - were spent on different projects.
Contracting staff told auditors that this kind of borrowing funds was an accepted practice in their office. Myers said that this procedure is not accepted anywhere else, and he cannot recall finding another department doing this in other audits.
Auditors also found that administration staff also unilaterally extended contract times, never bringing any of the contracts to the Board of Public Works. The reason that contracts would be extended, the report states, is so unspent money in the contracts could get spent. About $26 million spent through unauthorized contract extensions should have been returned to the state for other needs, auditors wrote.
Construction inspection services contracts were often missing several critical pieces of information that could be used to ensure the state was getting its money's worth. Auditors found that contracts had no scopes of work - detailed lists of tasks that must be done under the contract.
Office of Construction personnel told auditors that the contracts were detailed enough, and putting together a scope of work for each one would be cumbersome. Auditors disagreed on both counts.
Auditors also found that there was no single way to determine the maximum amount that a contract could be worth. Auditors examined four contracts worth $34 million, and asked the office for documentation backing up the money spent on each. No sensible documentation was provided, and different employees gave completely different methods of trying to estimate the costs.
The office sometimes gave inspection contracts for an area to multiple contractors. Auditors found that far too many contracts were given for no reason. One area had $15.4 million unspent on inspection contracts, and received Board of Public Works approval for another $16 million. Another area had $36.5 million in unspent contracts floating around, and received Board of Public Works approval for another $10 million.
Auditors received no justification for these initial contracts, and reported that the office never reported the amounts of other pending contracts to the Board of Public Works.
This is quite remarkable -- and ironic -- since Maryland was an early adopter of the ABA Model Procurement Code and seemingly had implemented it statewide. It just goes to underline the importance of properly implementing the system that is actually adopted.
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