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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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Failure to have active SAM registration at time of bid was not fatal

Government contractors must be registered in the System for Award Management (SAM) and complete required representations and certifications annually.

FAR 52.204-7 requires bidders, with some limited exceptions, to be registered in SAM at the time of bid and to continue to be registered until time of award, during performance, and through final payment.

Recently, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) addressed the issue of whether a bidder’s failure to have an active registration in SAM at time of bid renders the bid nonresponsive and ineligible for award in Master Pavement Line Corp., B-419111 (Dec. 16, 2020).

GAO concluded that SAM registration is a matter of responsibility, not bid responsiveness.

In that case, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued an Invitation for Bids (IFB) for the repair of signs and guiderails, as well as other safety repairs.  The IFB included a checklist for bid submission that advised that bidders had to be registered in SAM prior to contract award.  Master Pavement submitted a timely bid and was the apparent low bidder.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cf98267d-d76e-4b8d-9df5-cc7f0ffae5bc

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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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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/

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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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