The Contracting Education Academy

Contracting Academy Logo
You are here: Home / Archives for FPDS

By

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/

By

OMB should lead category management efforts to improve contract data, GAO says

Efforts to improve contract data must be led by the Office of Management and Budget, if its category management initiative is to improve, according to the Government Accountability Office.

GAO found OMB‘s category management initiative focused too much on how to buy things — at the expense of helping agencies determine what goods and services they actually need — when it assessed data for 28 agencies, reviewed guidance for four and interviewed officials.

The category management initiative saved $27.3 billion in three years by having agencies use existing contracts to buy similar products and services like those in the IT Category, but billions more could be saved if OMB pursues governmentwide solutions to data challenges.

“Agency officials told GAO that data challenges — particularly challenges in collecting, analyzing, and sharing data on their spending and the prices they pay — have hindered implementation of the category management initiative,” reads GAO’s congressional report released Monday. “OMB is aware of these government-wide challenges and has directed agencies to take certain steps on their own to address them.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/omb-category-management-data/

By

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/

By

FPDS reports will officially move to beta.SAM by mid-October

Users will no longer be able to run contract award reports through FPDS.gov, though that site will retain other capabilities.

As of October 17, federal vendors, contracting researchers and watchers and any other interested party, will no longer be able to run or access contract award data reports through the Federal Procurement Data System at FPDS.gov.

On that date, the General Services Administration expects to have completed the full migration of FDPS’s reporting functions—administrative, static, standard and ad hoc reports—to the beta.SAM.gov website under the Data Bank page.

“At that time, beta.SAM.gov will be the only place to create and run contract data reports and the reports module in FPDS.gov will be retired,” according to an update in GSA’s new beta.SAM.gov newsletter.

Originally, all of the reports functions were slated to transfer to beta.SAM.gov in March. However, GSA opted for a “soft launch” this spring, with an “agile iterative improvement process” set to conclude in October.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/08/fpds-reports-will-officially-move-betasam-mid-october/167685/

By

Pandemic oversight committee launches contract spending tracker

The committee stated in its first report that financial management could be a top challenge for agencies.
Click on image above to see contract spending compiled by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, established by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, has launched an online tool to track the federal government’s contract spending.  The committee is one of the various entities overseeing the government’s response to the novel coronavirus pandemic and is composed of 21 inspectors general. The relief package appropriated an unprecedented amount of money, so there has been increased pressure to ensure the funds are not misspent. As of last Tuesday, the federal government has committed to 7,474 contracts with 4,115 vendors and spending of $15.9 billion, according to ProPublica.

“Users can download the entire dataset to conduct their own analysis by examining contracts by category – for example medical services and equipment, janitorial services for government buildings, and personal protective equipment and safety supplies for government workers,” said the committee. There is also “an interactive map for users to explore the total amount of contract spending by state and county.”

The committee is using numbers from the Federal Procurement Data System to track the spending and will update the tracker weekly. The committee noted that contract documents aren’t usually made public because of their proprietary information, but individuals can try to obtain them through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2020/06/pandemic-oversight-committee-launches-contract-spending-tracker/166370/

The Contracting Education Academy at Georgia Tech has established a webpage where all contract-related developments related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) are summarized.  Find the page at: https://contractingacademy.gatech.edu/coronavirus-information-for-contracting-officers-and-contractors/

Contracting Academy Logo
75 Fifth Street, NW, Suite 300
Atlanta, GA 30308
info@ContractingAcademy.gatech.edu
Phone: 404-894-6109
Fax: 404-410-6885

RSS Twitter