Model Rules of Professional Conduct
Is It Time for a Single Federal Suspension & Debarment Rule?
In the early 1980s, the federal government improved the way in which executive branch agencies address waste, fraud, abuse, and poor performance in government-funded transactions by standardizing executive branch discretionary suspension and debarment procedures (sometimes referred to as “blacklisting”) in two separate rulemakings — one governing federal procurement transactions under the Federal Acquisition Regulation2 (FAR),3 and the second governing federal assistance, loans, and benefits under a jointly issued regulation called the Non-procurement Common Rule (NCR).4 The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) coordinated both initiatives.5 These rules were the direct result of several decades of criticism by the legal and business communities and the Administrative Conference of the United States regarding the federal suspension and debarment process.6 Following several court decisions that began to lay a constitutional foundation for a fundamentally fair debarment process,7 congressional oversight committees and the inspectors general community weighed in to bring about today’s regulatory scheme.8