Federal procurement doctrine requires contracting officers to determine whether a proposed price is "fair and reasonable" — but provides no standardized method for making that determination, no data quality standard for the evidence used, and no structured format for documenting the result. The consequence is systemic inconsistency: two officers facing identical acquisitions routinely reach different conclusions through different analytical paths, producing records that satisfy nominal compliance requirements while remaining indefensible under audit or protest review. This manuscript diagnoses that institutional failure and proposes a structured successor architecture. Part I traces the doctrine's evolution and identifies four discretion sites in FAR 15.404-1 where the absence of specification produces inconsistency: technique selection, comparator choice, evidentiary sufficiency, and the final price conclusion. Part II proposes four interlocking tools — the Evidentiary Stack (a five-tier source classification system), the Data Quality Taxonomy (a five-dimension quality assessment framework), the Pricing Consistency Matrix (a method-selection logic mapped to acquisition risk and data quality), and the Audit-Proof Price Negotiation Memorandum (a seven-module documentary template aligned to DCAA audit expectations and GAO protest standards). Part III examines machine-verifiable governance, comparative international models including the UK Single Source Regulations Office and EU abnormally-low-tender doctrine, the political economy of reform, and an operational manifesto for open pricing standards. The work is grounded in the author's sixteen years of direct experience as a certified Contracting Officer's Technical Representative with the U.S. Department of the Navy, administering Cradle-to-Grave federal procurement actions including price and cost analysis, forward-pricing rate negotiation, and Cost Accounting Standards compliance at the Alameda Naval Aviation Depot. The manuscript includes six fully developed appendices: forensic case studies with determination walkthroughs, a modular PNM template, reference pseudocode for machine-verifiable governance, a FAR/DFARS/CAS citation map, an audit crosswalk table, and an inter-agency deployment roadmap. A consolidated bibliography of 415 curated entries across 24 thematic sections is included. This work is deposited as an open-access preprint under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Appendix A is additionally released under CC BY 4.0 to permit adaptation for practitioner training use with attribution.
Alberto Rocha (Fri,) studied this question.