Federal agencies are managing hundreds of billions of dollars in contractual obligations without the financial visibility that private-sector companies apply to their own supplier agreements. That gap is the subject of an op-ed published in RealClearPolicy by Brandon Card, founder and CEO of the AI financial intelligence platform Terzo, who argues that government contracts should be managed as financial assets rather than as legal or administrative paperwork.
The scale of the problem is substantial. Card points to the Department of Defense's approximately $445 billion in annual contract obligations across roughly 226,000 active contracts, paired with eight consecutive failed audits, as evidence that agencies lack real-time insight into what their contracts actually commit them to. The implication is that without a shift in how contracts are treated, federal agencies will continue to operate with incomplete financial pictures that undermine both accountability and audit readiness.
The op-ed rejects the idea that more staffing alone can solve the problem. "No team, regardless of experience or size, can manually understand millions of contracts on a continuous basis," Card wrote. That constraint is what makes AI-assisted contract analysis a practical necessity rather than a luxury. By extracting obligations, pricing, and terms at scale, agencies could gain continuous visibility into commitments that currently remain buried in documents and spreadsheets.
Card's argument extends a model already proven in the private sector. That visibility runs through Document AI, which extracts obligations, pricing, and terms from contracts and purchase orders, and Contract Analytics, which turns that extracted data into spend, compliance, and risk dashboards. Those are the categories of tooling the op-ed points to as a template for how agencies could track obligations across large contract portfolios, turning static documents into a live financial picture.
The broader implication is that contract intelligence is moving from a private-sector cost-savings tool into a public-sector accountability mechanism. If federal agencies adopted the same financial lens that enterprises apply to third-party spend, they could identify obligations earlier, flag compliance risks sooner, and produce the kind of auditable records that have eluded the Department of Defense for years. The full op-ed is available on RealClearPolicy.
Terzo, founded in 2020, operates in the United States, Canada, and India, and its platform is designed to find money enterprises lose across their third-party and supplier spend ecosystem, including contracts, invoices, purchase orders, and renewals. The company's framing of contracts as financial assets rather than administrative artifacts reflects a wider shift in how organizations approach procurement and supplier risk.
For federal agencies facing persistent audit failures and immense contract volume, the stakes are not merely procedural. Treating contracts as financial assets would change what agencies can see, how quickly they can act, and whether they can account for the money they have already committed. Card's op-ed positions that shift as a necessary step toward public-sector financial accountability.
