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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 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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Agencies can start prepping systems for DUNS transition

The government will need to prepare for next year’s transition or risk the federal contracting version of Y2K.

The federal government is transitioning to a new unique entity identifier to track all vendors and organizations doing business with the government. The General Services Administration, which manages the system, released technical specifications for the two central APIs used to access the unique ID databases, kicking off the transition process for the rest of government.

For federal agencies that use the current ID numbers — read: all agencies — that will mean ensuring their systems are able to process the new ID format before the transition is complete at the end of 2020.

The government, through a contract with GSA, has relied on proprietary identifiers maintained by Dun & Bradstreet since 1962. The Data Universal Numbering System, or DUNS, number was officially codified in the Federal Acquisition Regulation in 1998, but last year GSA started the process of bidding the contract for the first time in 20 years.

GSA announced in March that Ernst & Young would be taking over the process and replacing the DUNS number with new Unique Entity ID, with the transition set to take place before the end of 2020.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/analytics-data/2019/12/agencies-can-start-prepping-systems-duns-transition/161929/

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Are GSA’s bold data management and transparency moves the right moves?

Data is essential to guide evidence-based decision-making, a critical best practice toward informed policy development.

A recent Government Accountability Office report has taken the government to task for failing to properly implement empirically sound and evidence-based practices as part of their deliberative process.

To encourage evidence-based decision-making, the recent President’s Management Agenda laid out a new cross-agency priority goal—“Leveraging Data as a Strategic Asset”—to develop and implement a comprehensive federal data strategy. Over the course of the next year, with input from the full spectrum of government and non-government stakeholders, the first governmentwide data strategy will be developed, along with specific recommendations for implementation. Office of Management and Budget sought to inform this process by issuing a comment draft in June.

By most accounts, the commitment to an overarching federal data strategy is welcome and timely. Huge amounts of data collected and managed by the federal government can be applied in a large variety of ways to foster economic growth and social good.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/ideas/2018/10/are-gsas-bold-data-management-and-transparency-moves-right-moves/152043/

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