A Conflict of Interest

Trump International Hotel in the historic
Post Office Pavilion -Washington D.C

The historic Post Office Pavilion in Washington, DC is at the center of a hot procurement debate. Since 2012, the building is under lease by the Trump Organization to operate a luxury hotel. With Jan. 20^th looming over the United States as we wait for President-Elect Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Trump’s business ties with the General Services Administration are coming to the forefront of the debate.

The Post Office lease between the GSA and the Trump Organization is a 60-year, $180 million-dollar deal that is now at the center of constitutional scrutiny. Contract language is clear: “No ... elected official of the Government of the United States ... shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom....”(top of page 103 Ground Lease) . As things stand right now, not only would Mr. Trump profit and be in clear violation of this contractual clause, there are other delineating factors to consider; Mr. Trump will now be the individual in charge of appointing a new GSA administrator, a person who would be directly involved in negotiations and changes to the contract he holds, including but not limited to rent increase.

The contractual question is whether a blind trust run by Mr. Trump’s children is truly blind enough to be considered separate from the President Elect. Especially considering his children having active roles in Mr. Trump’s transition team and interacting with foreign officials, the lines between business government are being blurred. Although Trump’s team is sighting a Dec 15^th conference, where Mr. Trump’s involvement in his own business will be cleared up, the mixing of his family in both business and government does raise concerns for many in Washington.

Government procurement experts are urging the GSA to terminate the lease before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, however this is the first time that the GSA has acknowledged this as a potential problem. Whether the conflict of interest that this situation produces is valid, the contract clauses the govern the situation seem clear and lays out a way for the GSA.

Conference Planning for 2017

With the end of the new year you are probably working on what conferences your team is doing to attend for the new year. Have you looked at what conferences would be good for your government sales?

The Federal agencies host a wide variety of free vendor outreach events throughout the year. There are also a few paid conferences that could be beneficial for your company, although we recommend to stick to as many of the outreach events as possible.

So, what are vendor outreach events? These are events hosted by each individual agency for contractors to meet with the buyers for that agency. This is a great opportunity for contractors to ask questions of the buyer and vice versa.

There are a few different places to find Federal events:

• FBO.gov
• Gov Events
• Individual agency websites

I suggest taking a look at these sites on a monthly basis, a few allow you to subscribe for monthly updates. 

As always if you have any questions give us a call! 234-212-3400

Transactional Data Reporting (TDR)- What is it and why do you care?

The new transactional data reporting rule is now requiring vendors to electronically report the price the federal government actually paid for an item of service through the GSA acquisition vehicle. The rules on pricing with GSA have always said that the negotiated price is a ceiling price- meaning that vendors are free to provide GSA customers with additional discounts as they see fit. This means that tracking the actual cost paid for products/services vs. the “GSA price” has been a consistent problem for contractors and the GSA alike.

TDR reporting will be more time intensive for contractors who chose to be a part of the pilot program. Tracking the price per product instead of dollars per SIN will require additional work. However, the benefits for contractors are great as well. With TDR, Commercial Sales Practices and the Price Reduction Clause track will be eliminated for those who chose to part of the pilot program! Once the mod is accepted, contractors participating in TDR will no longer have to provide a CSP when submitting contract modification and will not have to track their BOA customer.

For contractors that accept the modification between now and December 31^st, the new reporting rules will go into effect on January 1^st.

If you are unsure how TDR will affect your contract administration efforts, drop us a line at info@govconsvcs.com and we’ll see if you can help you unravel the new rules and how to best move forward. 

Fiscal Year 2016, A Year in Review

Fiscal year 2016 was a great success for small business contractors working with the GSA. The newest numbers from the Office of Small Business Utilization (OSBU) shows that there are currently 12,367 small business within the MAS program!

Here’s the further breakdown:

Small Disadvantaged	3051
Women-owned	3434
8A	1514
HUBZone	540
Service-disabled, Veteran-owned	1296
Veteran-owned	2284

Overall FY16 seemed to fare well for small businesses with more than $13 Billion dollars’ worth of contracts going directly to them.

The Federal Government is proving to be more frugal than ever before and is utilizing cost savings programs and cross agency spending initiatives to cut costs but not quality.

Looking at government spending in FY 2016, over $390 Billion were direct contract dollars throughout government spending (across vehicles and open bids). Spending was also slightly down from FY 2015 with the government spending $48,681,338,439 less in FY16.  Average dollars spent per year between 2008 and 2016 was $491,423,430,510 showing that FY 16 was almost a billion dollars below average over the last 8 years.

GCS is looking forward to the next fiscal year and the opportunity that it will bring to government contracts. Don’t forget that now is the best time to forecast opportunities and to start reaching out to your government contacts to make sure no stone goes unturned. We’re always here if you have any questions! 

October is Woman Owned Small Business Month!

On the heels of the Federal Acquisition Regulations being amended to incorporate Sole Sourcing for Woman Owned Small Business, the SBA has announced the October is Woman Owned Small Business Month!

Effective September 30, 2016, DoD, GSA, and NASA have adopted regulatory changes that provide authority to award sole course contracts to economically disadvantaged women owned small business and woman owned small business. Overall, this puts Woman Owned Small Businesses on equal footing with Service-Disabled Veteran Owned small business in receiving preferential treatment for contracts.

Working from this success, the SBA is targeting additional segments of woman owned business to help them succeed. The Encore Entrepreneurship for Woman webinar looks to assist women over the age of 50 who are launching their own businesses and pursing a second career. And for the other Women Owned Small Businesses, the What You Need to Know section on the SBA website is a treasure trove of incredibly useful information! 

Looking back over Fiscal Year 2016, government-wide overall spending with Women Owned Small Businesses almost reached the goal of 5% by allocating 4.45% or $15.2 Billion of $334.1B. That number is down .62% from the FY 15. Looking forward, the Sole Source provision should increase the number exponentially. Take a look at the full breakdown of set-aside spending!

GSA requires more when adding a new Special Item Number (SIN)

The General Services Administration is always making changes to solicitation, I am sure you receive those emails asking you to accept the changes in a mass modification. The newest change requires additional documentation for modifications that include adding a new Special Item Number (SIN).

The GSA is now requiring contractors to submit their original project experience, corporate experience, Open Ratings Report and quality control narrative in order to add a Special Item Number. For those contractors who have kept all of their initial GSA offer documents this new requirement is a breeze. However, for those that did not this change is going to be very tedious.

We do recommend that if you do not have these documents on file to reach out to your contracting officer. Although, the GSA does not have to provide the documents since it is the responsibility of the contractor to keep them on file. If your contracting officer is unwilling to provide you with the documents you will have to recreate them.

For new contractors this requirement will keep things a bit more tidy and organized since the emod system will automatically populate the documents. But for contractors that have been on Schedule for years this could be a bit of a mess.

As always you can always call the team at GCS for questions!

New SINs under Schedule 70

Recently the President announced his new Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP), the GSA is supporting this plan by adding four new Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services SINs. The following services will be included: penetration testing, incident response, cyber hunt and risk and vulnerability assessment.

Each SIN added to GSA has it’s own specific purpose and is designed to work together with other new cybersecurity and preexisting schedule 70 SINs to propose a full solution.

Here’s a quick description of the proposed SIN:

Penetration Testing (132-45A) is security testing in which assessors mimic real-world attacks to identify methods for circumventing the security features of an application, system, or network.

Incident Response(132-45B)  services help organizations impacted by a Cybersecurity compromise determine the extent of the incident, remove the adversary from their systems, and restore their networks to a more secure state.

Cyber Hunt (132-45C) activities are responses to crisis or urgent situations within the pertinent domain to mitigate immediate and potential threats

Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (132-45D) conduct assessments of threats and vulnerabilities, determines deviations from acceptable configurations, enterprise or local policy, assesses the level of risk, and develops and/or recommends appropriate mitigation countermeasures in operational and non-operational situations

One major GSA related change for adding cybersecurity your GSA schedule is SCP-FSS-004 within the solicitation document which required an Oral Technical Evaluation for offers submitting under those SINs. The Technical Evaluation Board will be an unclassified level discussion where your company will need to show their expertise in the subject matter.

Based on CNAP, over $19 billion dollars will be invested into cybersecurity as part of the President’s FY17 budget increasing more that 35%. With cybersecurity threats constantly looming and the world moving more and more into cyberspace, the government is recognizing the importance of security.