Abstract : To conduct the required review, DOD collected relevant public-private competition guidance, lessons learned, and best practices from the military services and DOD components. The majority of information on best practices and lessons learned was from the Navy, which has had the largest public-private competition program for many years. DOD complied with the statutory requirements in conducting its review of public-private competitions and in submitting its June 2011 report to Congress. Specifically, the report addressed the five required topics: compliance with a new requirement expanding competition requirements to activities with fewer than 10 federal employees; actions taken in response to issues raised by the DOD Inspector General (IG) in a 2008 report; the ability of existing systems to provide comprehensive and reliable data on the cost and quality of functions subject to public-private competition; the appropriateness of certain cost differentials and factors, such as the overhead rate, used in public-private competitions; and the adequacy of DOD policies regarding mandatory recompetitions of work previously awarded to employee groups. While DOD s report addressed the statutory requirements, concerns remain about some of the issues on which the DOD IG and we have previously reported. For example, DOD s report stated that upgrades to the current system used to track data on publicprivate competitions have been made, but because of the moratorium, DOD has not reviewed whether data reliability and accuracy actually has improved. Further, the report discussed the overhead rate used in the cost comparisons and called for no change, even though both the DOD IG and we have reported that the standard rate of 12 percent of labor costs does not have a sound analytical basis, which leaves some uncertainty about whether that rate may be understated or overstated for any given public-private competition.