The Contracting Education Academy

Contracting Academy Logo
You are here: Home / Archives for SAM.gov

By

SBA looks to tighten up certification process for women-owned small businesses

Women-owned small businesses, take note: the Small Business Administration is changing the certification process for doing business with the federal government.

Following a 2015 mandate from Congress, SBA will end its self-certification process for women-owned small businesses on October 15.  This comes after the agency’s inspector general found contract awards were going to vendors that didn’t meet the criteria for the program.

Business owners since last Wednesday have been able to submit their applications through the online platform, but SBA will only begin issuing decisions on those submitted applications on Oct. 15, the last day of the self-certification process.

Alisa Sheard, a program manager in SBA Women’s Contracting Office, said businesses already certified through the WOSB program must also go through the new certification process, requiring business owners to copy information found on their SAM.gov profile and transfer it to SBA’s online certification platform.

“Everyone will still need to submit answers to questions and upload documents because there’s no data migration. Those documents that were in the different system are not in this beta certified system, so they will have to upload all of those documents,” Sheard said in an interview.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/contracting/2020/07/sba-looks-to-tighten-up-certification-process-for-women-owned-small-businesses/

By

GSA’s procurement database is heading to a new home

The General Service Administration’s procurement database will be migrating to the agency’s new contracting website by the end of the second quarter of fiscal 2020, according to a GSA news release.

 

The Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation (FPDS-NG), which collects and reports procurement data from federal agencies, will be transitioned over to the new beta.SAM.gov website, the new GSA site that lists federal contracts and other contract data.

The migration is part of a larger GSA effort to consolidate its legacy websites to a single site.

The FPDS site serves several purposes for contractors and researchers.  On the site, users can research procurement data, validate procurement vehicles and modify transactions.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/2020/01/24/gsas-procurement-database-is-heading-to-a-new-home/

See fact sheet on transition here: FPDS Reports Are Transitioning – Fact Sheet – 01.2020

By

FBO no mo’

Today, beta.SAM.gov became the official source for federal business opportunities, replacing FBO.gov. 
This is the message visitors now see at FBO.gov.

FBO, which stood for Federal Business Opportunities (or the shortened term FedBizOpps), contained a list of virtually every federal contract valued at more than $25,000.  These contracts can now be found in the “Contract Opportunities” section of beta.SAM.gov.

The General Services Administration (GSA) is in charge of beta.SAM.gov.  GSA’s vision for the merged databases is “a ‘family tree’ that organizes federal government users and establishes relationships between each department/independent agency’s sub-tiers and its offices.”

Visitors who attempt to go to FBO.gov are automatically rerouted to fbohome.sam.gov which provides notice that FBO has moved.

In visiting the new site today, we encountered long delays in connecting to beta.SAM.gov as well as to its Contract Opportunities page at beta.sam.gov/help/contract-opportunities.  Users encountered similar delays when GSA last month moved the FARSite operated since 1996 by Hill Air Force Base to GSA-managed Acquisition.gov.   Because of high traffic, GSA had to delay the transition from Oct. 1 to Oct. 21.

Links on beta.SAM.gov appear to be working, but users will experience delays in moving from one page to another and in downloading documents.  Notably, we had to make multiple attempts to open the “FBO Transition Guide for Federal Administrators.”   The Guide provides instructions to federal officials on how to post contract opportunities and related information to beta.SAM.gov.  We encountered similar delays when trying to open various “Quick Start” guides.

The shift of FBO.gov to beta.SAM.gov is part of a larger merger of many legacy systems into one database.  Previously, “Wage Determinations Online” and the “Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance” were shifted into beta.SAM.gov.

By

FedBizOpps to merge with SAM.gov before year’s end

The General Services Administration (GSA) has announced that FedBizOpps.gov will migrate to a new SAM.gov site as early as the first quarter of FY20.

All totalled, as many as 10 GSA-managed websites are expected to be merged into SAM.gov by the end of 2019.

In addition to FedBizOpps and the existing SAM site, the other websites to be consolidated are: the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA), Wage Determinations Online (WDOL), Electronic Subcontracting Reporting System (eSRS), the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA), and contractor past performance databases Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS), Contractor Performance Assessment Reports System (CPARS), and the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS).

Once made a part of SAM.gov, FedBizOpps will be identified as “Contract Opportunities.”  A full description of the changes to be made to FedBizOpps, including new features to be introduced once the transition to SAM.gov is complete, appears in a fact sheet issued by GSA.  The fact sheet can be found here: FedBizOpps To Become ‘Contract Opportunities’ in SAM.gov

By

Changes coming to SAM.gov

The General Services Administration (GSA) is planning to test a new version of the System for Award Management (SAM). 

At present, SAM.gov is the federal database where vendors register to do business with the government.   When it went live in mid-2012, SAM was introduced as portal where, over time, several different government databases would be consolidated.  Federal Agency Registration (FedReg), the Online Representations and Certifications Application (ORCA), and the Excluded Parties List System (EPLS) were among the systems to be first consolidated under the SAM umbrella.

The 2012 introduction of SAM initially was delayed and, once launched, many access problems were encountered by vendors and government agencies alike.  Since then, SAM experienced a data breach in 2013 and periodic difficulties with the interface with SBA’s small business database.

GSA now plans to resume work on the original vision for SAM – the consolidation of as many as 10 websites.

A new test site, at beta.sam.gov, reportedly is to launch between July 1 and Sept. 30, 2017.

The objective of the consolidated web site is to reduce the federal contracting burden on contractors and federal officials alike by creating a single place to access a range of data, including contractor registration information, award data for prime and subcontractors, and information about companies excluded from government work.

Eventually, the functions of 10 existing sites — including SAM.gov, the Federal Procurement Data System (fpds.gov); Federal Business Opportunities (fbo.gov), the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act Subaward Reporting System (fsrs.gov), and the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (fapiis.go) — will become a part of the SAM beta site.  Once testing is completed, all of the added functionality will become a part of a new SAM.gov site.  The sites that were merged into SAM.gov then will be retired.

Improvements, such as search features, will continue to be made to existing sites as the new site is being tested, GSA says.

Vendors are reminded that there is no cost to use SAM.  Vendors may use SAM.gov free-of-charge to:

  • Register to do business with the U.S. government
  • Update or renew registrations
  • Check status of an entity registration
  • Search for entity registration and exclusion records

 

 

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