Raise your hand if you love completing your SAM profile! Um, anyone? Anyone?
Love it or hate it, SAM is a fact of life for government contractors, and it’s very important to get it right. Mistakes on your SAM profile (including those seemingly never-ending “reps and certs”) can come back to haunt you.
On December 1, please join me and Carroll Bernard, the co-founder of Govology, as we discuss how to set up your SAM profile–properly! Just click here to register. Hope to see you then!
Kind of like Disney+ for the federal contracting set, the FedBizOpps replacement went live today, November 12. But the parallels don’t stop there. Similar to the new streaming service’s technical issues, beta.SAM.gov has also experienced technical problems, based on our own experience sampling the site.
Continue reading“Change can be confusing. Change can be frustrating.” No, this is not from the cover of a self-help book. This is GSA’s acknowledgment that, often, we fear change.
To combat fears about changes to the DUNS number, GSA recently released a Q&A providing some answers on the new Unique Entity ID (UEI) Standard, which is set to replace the current DUNS system in December 2020. The Q&A followed GSA’s online meeting on the topic in July, which hosted over 700 attendees. GSA answered general questions about the transition, the UEI that will be used, and how to obtain a new identifier. Let’s take a look.
Continue readingThere’s a scene in 2016’s War Dogs where the Jonah Hill character explains to his employees that they are going to spend all day every day digging through one website. In the background, extras are seen staring in to the blue and yellow glow of FedBizOpps.gov.
“Oh my,” I exclaimed from my couch to no one in particular. “I use that website every day—it’s terrible.”
Continue readingAs our readers well know, a good proposal for a federal government procurement is an exercise in persuasive writing. You muster your creative powers to convince the source selection authority that you offer the best product or service, that your price is competitive, and that your past performance is stellar. So you invest heavily in your proposal writers; you review your proposal repeatedly to polish and ensure that it compels; you agonize.
But while the artistic portion of your proposal is, without dispute, extraordinarily important, don’t neglect the seemingly mundane–like CAGE codes. Get that wrong, and GAO just might sustain your competitor’s protest.
Despite a longstanding and very common misconception, the VA’s SDVOSB verification requirement doesn’t apply to non-VA SDVOSB contracts.
As the SBA Office of Hearings and Appeals recently reiterated, it was “simply not correct” to believe that a company was required to be verified in VetBiz to be awarded a non-VA SDVOSB contract.
There is no cost to register in SAM or other government contracting databases–but that hasn’t stopped some companies from charging would-be contractors hefty fees for assistance in the registration process. Some of these companies are out-and-out frauds, like the Tampa firm whose owner recently pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a FEMA registration scheme. And others, while not fraudulent, still often neglect to mention an important (but for them, inconvenient) fact: government contracts registration assistance is available for free through Procurement Technical Assistance Centers and other reputable sources.
Now, a bipartisan new Senate bill aims to get the word out about the free registration assistance available to prospective contractors.