FPDS | The Contracting Education Academy

July 1, 2020 By cs

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/

May 8, 2020 By cs

GSA extends procurement data reports transition due to coronavirus, feedback

The General Services Administration (GSA) won’t require anyone to use the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) reports function within beta.SAM.gov until the end of 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

FPDS.gov tracks all federal contracts of $10,000 or more, and its reporting module uses transactional data from procurements in ad hoc, standard and static reports.

The Integrated Award Environment office at GSA began moving its reports function to beta.SAM.gov on Feb. 1 but is now calling it a soft launch.

“We want to require the FPDS reports by the end of this year,” said Vicky Niblett, deputy assistant commissioner at IAE, during an ACT-IAC virtual session. “I will say we had wanted to do it sooner, but with COVID-19 and what we heard from our users, we are now targeting a little bit closer to the end of the year.”

IAE learned it needs to give the contracting community more lead time into transitions because there is a “large” learning curve using the new ad hoc report tool, MicroStrategy (not to be confused with the business intelligence company). The migration to beta.SAM.gov’s Data Bank was slated for completion on March 16, but for now, FPDS.gov users can continue creating reports there — though they won’t transfer.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/gsa-fpds-reports-transition-extended/

March 29, 2020 By cs

Agencies have spent more than $300 million in response to the COVID-19 outbreak

Federal buyers spent more than $4.8 million on hand sanitizer alone in the last two months.

**According to the CDC, a novel coronavirus, formally named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), is identified as the cause of a worldwide outbreak of respiratory illness.**

Federal agencies have spent upward of $300 million over the last two months in response to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Between February 1 and March 22, agencies reported spending more than $297.8 million on telework products and services—such as virtual meeting rooms, collaboration tools and virtual private networks—and health products like hand sanitizer and ventilators, according to data maintained in the Federal Procurement Data System.

An analysis by The Pulse of GovCon, a federal contracting market intelligence firm, looked at all federal spending data tagged with the National Interest Action code “COVID-19-2020” and variations, such as “covid-19,” “covid19,” and “coronavirus.” The analysis shows agencies spent $6.5 million on ventilators, nearly $4.8 million on hand sanitizer, $3.7 million on gloves and $3.2 million on disinfectants. The balance was spent on personnel support services and IT products and support for teleworking.

But Pulse analysts stressed that the data is likely incomplete at this time.

“Many contracting offices supporting COVID-19, particularly those relocated to the disaster recovery area, do not have access to their normal contract writing systems and thus have not been able to populate FPDS-NG contemporaneously with the contract awards they have made,” they said in a summary report. “Others have not had time to enter data due to the tempo of operations.”

Analysts also noted these figures do not include Defense Department spending, as that data is kept on a 90-day delay for the sake of national security.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2020/03/agencies-have-spent-more-300m-response-covid-19-outbreak/164097/

March 12, 2020 By cs

Pilot IRS to return with new focus areas and significantly more funding

In the next three to six months, the IRS plans to issue new solicitations through its experimental contracting vehicle.

The IRS is considering tripling down on its experimental procurement vehicle Pilot IRS — an incremental funding program the tax agency uses to identify and develop cutting-edge technologies—with the second iteration of the program coming in the next few months, with three new focus areas and more than three times the funding up for grabs.

The first iteration of Pilot IRS sought to update the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation, or FPDS-NG, using robotic process automation tools to improve data quality and limit the amount of manual data entry. As with other alternative procurement methods like other transaction authority contracts, the Pilot IRS program uses a multi-phased funding approach that rewards vendors that meet milestones in a timely fashion.

Three weeks after issuing the solicitation in August, the IRS made five awards for the first phase, totaling $25,000. Since that time, “Two firms continue to receive funding, and have demonstrated return on investment rates of roughly 30-80% reductions in time required to make corrections to and improve the data in FPDS-NG,” according to a program update posted last Wednesday to beta.SAM.gov.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2020/03/pilot-irs-return-new-focus-areas-and-significantly-more-funding/163526/

March 2, 2020 By cs

Change is hard vs. real problems: The tale of the beta.sam.gov portal

In the three months since the General Services Administration transitioned to the beta.sam.gov portal for contract opportunities from the decades-old FedBizOpps.gov site, the raw numbers show concerns over the site have settled down.

The site has seen almost 900,000 visitors and 120,000 registered users since November. The number of calls to GSA’s help desk is at or below the levels that came in during the pre-transition time.

“We don’t get any more help desk calls or asks for intervention than we did with the legacy FBO. And the calls we do get are generally around two things: how to log in and do multi-factor authentication and the second is how to use the new search features because they look very different than the legacy site,” said Judith Zawatsky, assistant commissioner in the Office of Systems Management in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, in an interview with Federal News Network.

But if you dig deeper, particularly the folks who understand the inner workings of the new site, frustration and disappointment over the transition and functionality of beta.sam.gov continue.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2020/02/change-is-hard-vs-real-problems-the-tale-of-the-beta-sam-gov-portal/

The committee stated in its first report that financial management could be a top challenge for agencies.

The General Services Administration (GSA) won’t require anyone to use the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) reports function within beta.SAM.gov until the end of 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Federal buyers spent more than $4.8 million on hand sanitizer alone in the last two months.

In the next three to six months, the IRS plans to issue new solicitations through its experimental contracting vehicle.

In the three months since the General Services Administration transitioned to the beta.sam.gov portal for contract opportunities from the decades-old FedBizOpps.gov site, the raw numbers show concerns over the site have settled down.

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