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GSA to verify identities of some SAM users after transition

New capabilities being added in May to beta.SAM.gov — the General Services Administration’s consolidated procurement website — will come with new, stringent security protocols requiring certain users to verify their accounts are connected to real-world people.

On May 24, the entity registration functions of SAM.gov will be moved over to beta.SAM.gov and the latter will lose the “beta” and become the one and only SAM.gov. At that time, GSA plans to institute new security measures for entity registration — voluntary at first but mandatory come October.

As GSA consolidates all of its procurement tools into a single site, the agency has been incorporating Login.gov as the single sign-on for all of these capabilities. When the System for Award Management, or SAM, registration functions are ported over, the system will take advantage of Login’s identity proofing capability for an added layer of security.

The identity proofing — verifying that an online account is connected to a specific, real person — will be for users who manage organizations’ SAM registration, which includes the unique identifier used to reference entities receiving federal contracts and grants and all the identifiable information about that organization.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/02/gsa-verify-identities-some-sam-users-after-transition/172216/

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GSA’s central procurement hub — SAM — will keep the ‘beta’ a little longer

Users will get a preview in April of the new SAM.gov — a central, one-stop website for all of the General Services Administration’s acquisition tools — but will have to wait a bit longer to access the full capabilities of the current SAM.gov.

Since 2017, GSA’s Integrated Award Environment has been operating two websites with the SAM moniker: the original SAM.gov, where companies and organizations register before vying for federal contracts and grants, and beta.SAM.gov, soon to be the central procurement website. Beta.SAM will ultimately consolidate 10 acquisition tools, and already includes Contract Opportunities — formerly Federal Business Opportunities, better known as FedBizOpps or FBO — and the reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System, or FPDS, which now reside on the Data Bank page.

The next major transition will be moving functionality from the current SAM.gov to beta.SAM, shuttering the former and dropping the “beta” from the latter.  GSA officials had planned to finalize the transition before the end of April but have since revised that timeline.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2021/02/gsas-central-procurement-hub-will-keep-beta-little-longer/171951/

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GSA’s SAM.gov will lose its ‘beta’ in April

The legacy SAM.gov will be shuttered and all the capabilities will be folded into the new SAM.gov, which currently goes by beta.SAM.gov.

The registration site for organizations doing business with the federal government will be migrating to the new central website for all procurement systems, allowing the latter to drop the “beta” designation and clear up some confusing nomenclature.

The System for Award Management, currently housed at SAM.gov, is used by federal contractors and grantees to register for the unique number used to identify the organization in official documents — similar to a Social Security number.  The site, managed by the General Services Administration, shares a name with the agency’s developing central procurement hub, beta.SAM.gov.

GSA’s Integrated Award Environment program office has been working on consolidating all related procurement tools on a single website since 2018. The effort started with migrating the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, or CFDA, and Wage Determination Online, or WDOL, tools to beta.SAM, followed by two of the most-used acquisition tools in government.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/12/gsas-central-procurement-hub-will-lose-beta-april/170541/

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Administration adds 16 months to transition from DUNS to Unique ID

The General Services Administration will extend Dun & Bradstreet’s services while agencies get more time to patch and test systems. 

GSA pushed the deadline for adopting a new identifier for non-governmental organizations receiving funds from the government, giving federal agencies and contractors another 16 months to patch and test their systems.

The government is shifting from the DUNS number — the unique identifier for every organization doing business with the government since 1962 — to the Unique Entity Identifier. Agencies were originally expected to make the switch by December 2020 but have been given an extension to April 2022.

However, federal officials tell Nextgov the deadline extension will only help if agencies and organizations are able to use DUNS and UEI numbers at the same time during a testing period, which might be possible under the revised timeline.

Procurement, grants and financial reporting executives across the government were scrambling to meet the December 2020 deadline to turn off an almost 60-year standard for identifying organizations doing business with the government and switch to a brand new system introduced last year.

“This is a pretty unique business problem,” an agency official working through the transition told Nextgov. “This is not just large-scale system modernization. This is the most interdependent thing about doing business between the federal government and a non-federal entity—it’s at the heart of it.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2020/10/administration-adds-16-months-transition-duns-unique-id/169636/

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How and when GSA’s new central contracting portal will lose the ‘beta’

The next major transition to beta.SAM — the FPDS contract award data reporting tools — is coming next month, with the legacy SAM.gov next on deck.

Next month, the reporting function of a key federal contracting data tool will be retired as officials push users toward a new tool on a new site destined to become the central hub for all government contracting.

Moving the reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System — and other parts of the larger transition—has led to widespread frustration and confusion among contracting officers and vendors alike. The program office managing the transition is hoping to quell these issues for future roll-outs and through improved training sessions for users.

The General Services Administration is in the midst of an ambitious plan to consolidate every federal contracting tool—vendor registration, solicitations, contracts databases, past performance information, wage rates—on a single website.

The final site will be called SAM.gov — named for the System for Awards Management — but it won’t be the same as the current SAM.gov, where federal contractors go to register their companies before being allowed to bid on solicitations. The original SAM.gov is still live while the Integrated Award Environment, or IAE, team at GSA moves functionality for that and other tools to the beta.SAM.gov website.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2020/09/how-and-when-gsas-new-central-contracting-portal-will-lose-beta/168420/

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